Dear Editor,
Can a developing country have democracy and at the same time achieve impressive gains in growth and economic development? This is a topic that is occasionally discussed, and, quite frankly, I don’t know what the answer is. We don’t hear very much about the politics of Asian countries, as most of the news is devoted to economics and business, and I rather like that. However, I do know that many of the countries in Asia are making remarkable progress in the economic realm. To cite a few examples, there are Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and others like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, although not developing as rapidly, are much better off than they were, say twenty years ago. I purposely left out China and India, as they are the true Asian giants and, as such, I prefer to deal with them separately. I know that Singapore may not be all that democratic, and I know that Hong-Kong is, but I am not so sure about Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea.
India is widely regarded as a democratic society, but then we hear all those mind-boggling stories about the discriminatory nature of the caste system, and how you have to be a fair-skinned Indian to get the really big roles in the Indian movie industry. Maybe, these two occurrences by themselves cannot invalidate India’s claim to be democratic. So, I guess that we can safely say under democracy India has grown quite a lot, and so has Hong-Kong and maybe even Japan. With China, however, we have Capitalist economics juxtaposed with a Communist regime. So, although China has a free market economy, the Chinese society is not really democratic. And, of course, China is looming as the true economic giant of the twenty-first century. Is the absence of democracy really helping China to develop? I don’t know for sure, so I would be cautious about drawing a conclusion that would suggest that there is an incompatibility between democracy and development, except to say that maybe it depends on the particular society.
