The general view is that SOUTH has poor governance, and is corrupt and difficult to do business with. This is only part of the story.

The problems of SOUTH governance have been enormously aggravated by the behavior of most of the leading countries in the NORTH. During the cold war being “against” the Soviet Union was enough to make a government a “friend” of the United States. And a lot of wasteful and damaging fund flows and trade transactions took place in these “friendly” relationships. The US relationship with Mobuto in Zaire is one high profile example of a string of convenient and corrupt relationships.

The magnitude of the global damage to long term development and financial stability is difficult to assess, but it is almost certainly far bigger than the ODA fund flows that we know about.

The Soviet Union was in the same mode as the United States during the cold war.

I have worked in a number of countries where the Soviet Union (as it then was) had a lock on government initiatives. The Soviet Union had helped fund their wars of independence and they expected something in return. Nobody seemed to know what they “owed” the Soviet Union in tangible financial terms. There did not seem to be a bill, but just the threat of a bill. And a big one. So, not surprisingly, the Soviet Union was able to set the terms of a lot of their “investments” and “joint ventures” in ways that (in my view) were very favorable to the SOUTH client. This tactic was being used to give the Soviet distant water fishing trawlers access to rich fishing grounds, with almost no benefit to the host country. Value destruction at its worse.