THE Irish writer Samuel Beckett received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Waiting for Godot is his famous 1953 surrealistic tragicomedy, where the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, are engaged in a variety of discussions, while they wait for someone named Godot. They are not certain if they have ever met Godot, nor if he will even arrive.
A quarter of the 21st century is gone. Today, countries like India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, or the Philippines, feel an immense pressure to move up in the income ladder. This has prompted them to create development plans that assume they will grow by about 7% per year, like the East Asian Tigers did several decades ago. Will this become a reality, or will it be like Waiting for
Godot?
The problem is that the East Asian super-fast growth miracle has not been the historical development norm. It took today’s advanced countries about 100 years on average (almost 150 in the case of the Netherlands) to traverse the middle-income segment, that is, from the time they graduated from being low-income to the moment they became high-income economies
(https://jesusfelipe.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Middle-IncomeTrap.pdf). The reality of development is that it has been a very slow journey, at low growth rates. Very fast growth and sustained growth is a recent phenomenon that has occurred only in the second half of the 20th century in a few countries. This means that countries like the Philippines, with an income per capita of just above $4,000 today, must have grown very slowly for a very long time.