Thought du jour: why poor countries should not emulate Cuba

We cannot make poverty history unless the countries of the
bottom billion start to grow, and they will not grow by
turning them into Cuba. Cuba is a stagnant, low-income
egalitarian country with good social services. If the
bottom billion emulated Cuba, would this solve their
problems? I think that the vast majority of the people
living in the bottom billion--and indeed in Cuba--would
see it as continued failure. To my mind, development is
about giving hope to ordinary people that their children
will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of
the world. Take that hope away and the smart people will
use their energies not to develop their society but to
escape from it--as have a million Cubans.

Paul Collier, _The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest
Countries are Failing and What Can be Done About It_
(Oxford University Press, 2007),p. 12.

[This is an amazing book that is a very good read --no
footnotes, no bibliography, no charts, no tables--even
though it was written by an academic economist. Everyone--
economist or not--will learn something from it. The book
is only 205 pages long, including a 9 page index. Collier
is Professor of Economics at Oxford and former director of
Development Research at the World Bank. His Web site is
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~econpco/ .]