(AfriquesPlus) - Four decades ago, a garment sewn in a Dhaka workshop could still buy a country's way out of poverty. That ladder, once open to any nation willing to sell cheap and borrow to build, has all but collapsed, and a widely discussed Foreign Policy essay argues no single replacement will fit every country left standing at its foot.
Writing in Foreign Policy's Fall 2026 print edition (published online September 9, 2026), Tufts University political scientist Michael Beckley opens with two contrasting case studies. In the 1980s, Bangladesh was desperately poor and exported barely $30 million a year in simple garments; European tariff exemptions and a wave of Western retailers hunting for cheap production, combined with credit unlocked by those orders, turned the sector into a powerhouse. By 2022, garment exports topped $40 billion — a thousandfold increase — employing roughly 4 million people, while average annual income climbed from under $300 in 1990 to about $2,600.
Ethiopia tried to climb the same ladder a generation later and found it broken: after borrowing $1 billion to build six industrial parks, the government saw them employ only about 90,000 people by mid-2021, against 2 million new workers entering the labor force every year. Saddled with nearly $500 million in scheduled interest payments and hit by the pandemic, civil war, and new U.S. tariffs, Ethiopia defaulted on its debt; income per person remains around $1,000 a year.
That contrast, Beckley writes, captures the collapse of what he calls the post-Cold War "development bargain." Between 1991 and 2016, poor countries grew twice as fast as rich ones — nearly three times as fast counting China and India — with average incomes tripling, child mortality and conflict deaths roughly halving, and the number of democracies doubling; the rich-poor income gap, which had exceeded 8-to-1 by 1991, narrowed to 5-to-1 by 2016. In his words, "the era of easy growth has ended, and the old rules no longer hold." Thirteen poor-country democracies have since collapsed into autocracy — a quarter of their total — battle deaths have more than doubled, nearly a third of Africa's 54 countries are embroiled in war, and global child deaths under age five were projected to rise in 2025 for the first time in decades.
Beckley attributes the reversal to four supports that poor countries never built themselves but simply borrowed from a favorable global moment, and that are now withdrawing at once. Foreign customers are drying up. The 72 countries the World Bank classifies as low- or lower-middle-income collectively consume only a quarter as much as the United States, and discriminatory trade measures against them have risen 72% since 2016, while China — now producing a third of the world's manufactured goods, more than triple its 2004 share — still captures nearly two-thirds of the value added in the low-skill apparel and footwear exports poorer countries depend on.
Deindustrialization is arriving before industrialization ever takes hold, as the number of industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers worldwide more than doubled between 2016 and 2023 and export-related jobs fell by 45 million between 2007 and 2018 alone, leaving 60 to 80% of the workforce in the informal sector. Capital that once flowed freely — including more than $800 billion in Chinese loans between 2000 and 2017 — has reversed sharply, with Chinese lending collapsing from $87 billion in 2016 to under $4 billion in 2021 and developing countries paying creditors $741 billion more than they received between 2022 and 2024, leaving 3.4 billion people in countries that now spend more servicing interest than on health or education.
And foreign aid and peacekeeping, which had lifted life expectancy in low-income countries by nearly nine years between 2000 and 2017, are being dismantled: eight of the ten largest OECD donors cut aid in 2024, the Trump administration ended 86% of USAID programs, and U.N. peacekeeper numbers have fallen 60% from their peak.
Rather than a single fix, Beckley argues each country's path now depends on two questions, what it has that outsiders want, and what its government can actually do. Countries holding strategic minerals or chokepoints, such as Egypt's Suez Canal or Djibouti's position at the Red Sea's entrance, can trade that leverage for durable assets like railways, ports, and worker training, as Morocco and Zambia are each testing in different ways around electric-vehicle investment and the Lobito Corridor.
He points to Botswana as the clearest precedent for why state capacity determines whether such bargains last: by keeping mineral rights under national control, forming a 50-50 joint venture with De Beers, and channeling diamond revenue through the treasury rather than private hands, "a relatively capable, well-paid civil service" turned the proceeds into roads, schools, and hospitals, lifting the country to upper-middle-income status.
