A New Engine of Development

The essay compares Bangladesh's garment-industry boom, which lifted average income from under $300 to about $2,600 since 1990, with Ethiopia's industrial park initiative, which borrowed $1 billion but employed only about 90,000 people against 2 million new labor-market entrants each year. Ethiopia eventually defaulted on its debt amid pandemic disruption, civil war, and new U.S. tariffs.

The piece frames these as bookends on an era of development where cheap labor alone no longer guarantees industrial takeoff, citing automation and saturated markets in manufacturing and low-cost services.

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