Dialogue Box
| Pages | 28-29 |
Page 28
Antoinette Sayeh
Head of the IMF's African Department and former Finance Minister of Liberia
Travel in any African country and you will quickly see that the road is where the action is-where you find people, commerce, and vitality. Travel in any of the poorest African countries emerging from conflict and you see a multitude of impassable roads impeding recovery and nation building.
Developing countries operate under seriously constrained choices, with scarce resources for capital investments. Investments, then, must target those sectors in which their impact will be multiplied manyfold, easing bottlenecks to further development.
Roads are the link to trade- national and international. They allow crops to get to the market, children to get to school, the sick to get to clinics. They can unite a divided postconflict country.
With a good road to the interior and to other nations, those with ports will see increased commerce and revenues; those in the interior will be able to sell their harvest for higher prices- and buy other goods for less.
Roads are also not hard to sell-everyone would love to see a road in their town. The Liberian people, in consulting around our new Poverty Reduction Strategy, overwhelmingly cited roads as their number-one priority for the next three years.
Finally, roads bring into sharp relief the twin challenges of the international community in the poorest countries- making available adequate nondebt financing and building sustainable capacity quickly.
We are all aware of the mistakes of the past; road investments need to be selected strategically, so that the roads we build are the right ones, and so that we protect our investments with sustainable maintenance programs.
Done correctly, roads can spur faster development, paving the way for greater prosperity. In Liberia, they could transform lives, increasing the prospects for sustainable peace.
F&D asked a number of opinion leaders around the world to answer the question, What's the single thing most likely to double living standards in poor countries over the next decade? The responses were as diverse as the respondents.
Domenico Lombardi
President of the Oxford Institute for Economic Policy and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
Weak governance is by far the most expensive tax levied on the populations of poor countries. It is regressive, so the poorest of the already poor pay the highest rates, and it is firmly enforced, without exception or appeal.
Despite their weak governance, many poor economies have managed to achieve some noticeable economic and social gains.
Yet, in the face of widespread poverty, substantial progress is unlikely to materialize if these countries do not fully address the constraints posed by their underlying institutional weaknesses.
Governance is about fostering relationships of...
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