It is tempting to think a country develops the moment its income goes up. But you can double a nation’s income and leave its people no healthier, no better schooled, no freer — and you can lift lives dramatically without the headline number moving as much as you’d expect. This chapter is about telling those two things apart: growth, the number, and development, the life behind it. Each case below is one country’s way of showing the difference.
Two countries with almost the same income — one where people live to 77 and nearly all children are in school, one where they don’t. Same number, different lives.
Malaysia, Ethiopia, Ukraine — a similar starting line, and three completely different journeys. Growth, stagnation, and a country rebuilt from the ground up.
How Malaysia walked out of the rice field and into the export economy — and why the shape of an economy tells you more than its size.
Six vital signs that tell you how a nation is really doing — and why a bank, of all things, gets to draw the lines between rich and poor.