>>That is one thing that is holding even India back. In democratic setup it is very difficult to take a long term view particularly when that comes with short term pain - the govt would be out in next election.

The one thing you can count India on is that democracy will prevail.

Any government which comes to power will always appease industrialists and investors albeit their electioneering manifesto may have been on the upliftment of the proletariat and bourgeois

Actually Africa only has as much coastline as Europe despite being much larger. It has a high proportion of landlocked countries.

This wouldn't be such a big deal if the landlocked countries joined an African Union or something like that.

Technically, according to Cantor, every stretch of coastline has exactly as much as every other stretch of coastline ever.

Some infinities are larger than others.

> That is one thing that is holding even India back. In democratic setup it is very difficult to take a long term view particularly when that comes with short term pain - the govt would be out in next election. Africa should learn both from countries like China, Singapore...

What do you mean, become autocratic/centralized/...or whatever other word you want to choose. That's a quick one way ticket to getting invaded and thrown out by the US government.

The US doesn't care if you're autocratic; they've propped up and outright installed plenty of dictators.

You're right, but it's an awfully useful pretense for America to invade you if you're not "democratic"

That's just been completely orthogonal. Autocrats that toe the line get to stay in power; democracies that don't get military coups.

But, I thought that the destroying property and violence doesn’t bring about democratic changes?

Or is that only when the US is tsk tsking about how other countries treats its citizens....

>What do you mean, become autocratic/centralized/...or whatever other word you want to choose. That's a quick one way ticket to getting invaded and thrown out by the US government.

The US government has no problems with autocratic governments, in fact they have propped many in the past. No, if you don't agree with them in economic terms they will invade. And there are plenty of excuses to go around, not that anyone cares anymore really. Iraq was supposed to have chemical weapons and everyone disliked Bush for that, but with Obama the US is at war in multiple countries with no visible excuse.

Just FYI, Africa is not a country. It’s the second largest continent on earth.

achow did not state that Africa was a country. achow stated that Africa should learn from countries. Nothing factually incorrect about suggesting that a continent’s worth of countries could learn something from other countries.

I am a capitalist and I think politicians just reflect the situation on the ground. If the conditions are right Market will automatically take the lead. If it hasn't happened in India yet probably the market conditions are not right and there may be few one can explore but the bottomline is mineral availability.