Building capital requires financing. Financing depends on trust and stability. From your description, it seems like the issue is an ineffective legal system that allows widespread fraud.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4LSuZGlqL34
African attitudes and behavior are very different from those of people whose nations have developed technologically in the past 200 years. No amount of loans will teach people how to mix concrete or organize an effective workforce. These are things that people either decide to do on their own or have imposed upon them by a colonial power.
I oppose ensnaring third world nations in debt. Either give them free stuff or let them figure civilization out on their own. "We can help them while making money at the same time" is always a veil for exploitation.
Predatory loans are not the whole picture. Stock markets and business loans have made many poor people rich. I know some of them.
> No amount of loans will teach people how to mix concrete or organize an effective workforce.
Student loans can help here.
> I oppose ensnaring third world nations in debt.
The developed world does not have a monopoly on finance. Credit unions and microcredit are possible anywhere, but nevertheless depend on trust and stability.
There are African countries with well functioning legal system.
Widespread fraud is, you know, happens much across the rich world, and victims are usually much the same demographic.
You can't prosecute a man going missing without a trace.
None have been built, although both Madagascar and Honduras briefly considered the idea. The theory is presumably inspired by Hong Kong, but obviously Hong Kong wasn't set up with any such purpose.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_city_(economic_develop...
We hear a lot about how China invests billions in Africa building highways and such in order to have influence. I have a conspiracy theory based on stories I heard. It would be nice to know if is true or not. What Americans don't realize is that the Gambino crime family didn't just dissolve, they went to Africa, and they bought rights to natural resources such as coal. They have since the early 2000s become the brokers between natural resources in Africa and 3rd party buyers around the world and their business is violence.
So my question is: why do you think the Gambino family moved there and what evidence do you have for your claims?
I can't find anything about the Gambino family having assets in Africa.
Edit: I get your point now that the king paid locals to help cause "crimes against humanity" ... I'd say given modern media practices that a mafia don doing something similar would be most difficult.
This thread reminds me of the Netflix TV show Lillyhammer on a smaller scale.
That's actually not true. King Leopold forbade his soldiers from using indigenous fighting and torture practices, but some divisions with black commanders continued the practice against the king's orders. Leopold was criticized in the Belgian press for allowing black officers to command as those atrocities were viewed as a foreseeable outcome of such policy.
Africa is a big place.
Where exactly in Africa? If you have some sources, this sounds like an interesting read.
The massive credit expansion is exactly what you don't want if you want to ease the housing market.
The Economist got almost everything in this story wrong.
I have personal experience of being to Nigeria a few times on infrastructure subcontract projects.
The predominant portion of those abandoned construction sites are made by plain fraudsters, take money, make a semblance of construction going, then vanish with money.
Urban apartment housing in most of Africa is seen as something for a more affluent, and well off, much alike how it is in Asia, and not the other way around as it is in the West.
There are quite proficient builders in economically relatively well doing African countries. Take a look on http://www.mhfproperties.com/
Where fraud proliferates are 2nd tier African economies, and housing for people lower on the class ladder (ones who are just entering the middle class, and still want save hard on housing.)
The shortages of cement, steel, and construction supplies bear much more on the availability of housing than any of that "liquidity" thing.
Africa needs more factories, more mills, more kilns, more technical know how. At the moment even such basic things like petrol, and cement are largely import only even in most developed African economies.
This leads to those countries squandering their short FX resources gained largely from agricultural exports, which could've been spent in import of something more useful, and productive, like plant machinery.