Governance as ‘Kicking Away the Ladder'

The label ‘poor governance’ throws together real evils such as corruption and rent-seeking with a new group of alleged evils which are actually good for development, including a role for the state in the economy and support for domestic capital. Successful development policies of Europe in the late nineteenth century and the Asian Tigers and Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century are now labelled as ‘poor governance.’ This is what Ha-Joon Chang described as ‘kicking away the ladder’ by which rich countries climbed to development, so that today’s poor countries cannot follow. Mozambique is cited as an example of how the good governance rhetoric has been misused to retard development and poverty reduction.