To become a modern, high-income country is a dream shared by all developing countries.

According to the World Bank, in the period between the end of WWII and 2008, among 200 developing economies, only South Korea and Taiwan (China) moved up from the status of low-income economies to high-income economies. Moreover, among the 101 middle-income economies in 1960, only 13 became high-income economies by 2008.

Mainland China is likely to achieve this success by around 2025. These statistics indicate that most developing economies, including Namibia, have not been able to escape the low-income or middle-income trap in spite of a half-century of development efforts by the people and governments in the developing countries themselves and the support and guidance provided by various multilateral and bilateral development institutions.

Potentially, a developing country can grow faster than a developed country and achieve convergence to the high-income status. The failure of most developing countries to narrow the income gap with the developed countries is frustrating for developing countries and puzzling for the regional and global development community.

As Keynes said: “It is ideas, not vested interests, that are dangerous for good or evil.”

It is no secret that most developing countries’ inability to escape the low- or middle-income trap reflects the failures of existing development ideas and policy design.

Ideas in general are shaped by theories. The applicability of a theory depends on the preconditions of the theory.

Most prevailing theories in the world are generated from the experiences of developed countries and thus embedded in the conditions of developed countries.

A developing country has the latecomer advantage in technological innovation, industrial upgrading and improvement of hard and soft infrastructure. However, for developing countries such as Namibia to improve development performance, a lot still needs to be done with a focus on policy design and doing away with “business as usual.”

Instead of just studying theories generated from the experiences of developed countries, which have different preconditions from developing countries, it is high time we, as developing countries, invest our efforts to interrogate our successes and failures and design policies in which modern economic growth is embedded.

This will ensure we attain structural transformation with continuous technological innovation and upgrade our industries, and this in return raises labour productivity and improves our hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure (institutions), which ultimately reduces transaction costs.

*Peya Junior Mushelenga is a national development advisor at the National Planning Commission (NPC) and a full-time Master of Public Administration (National Development) student, at Peking University, China and holds B-tech Economics (Polytech), Bachelor’s degree in economics, Honours (NUST), MBA-Strategy (UNAM-NBS). The views expressed in this opinion piece are his own.