But the alternative you put is to assume that their failures are due to external forces and their success due to policy choices.

China also has a history of severe exploitation and other uncontrolled factors. They got wealthy with breathtaking speed. It is unwise to look past that to Togo.

I don't think anyone is claiming that we should only look at Togo and not other nations that have implemented successful policy. On the contrary, governors should look around the globe to find examples of success stories in order to build a corpus from which to learn about the realities of policymaking.

Shenzhen seems to be an example of making a small number of extremely wealthy individuals and a large number of sweatshop-tier factory labourers; I wouldn't class that as an example to follow unless you only care about creating millionaires.

> But the alternative you put is to assume that their failures are due to external forces and their success due to policy choices.

I'm not assuming it, but I think someone should make that argument given that the country was subject to over 300 years of brutal colonialism which included being the literal capital of the slave trade and later neocolonialism. China's a different story because they eradicated foreign ownership and interference before any of its success and still has pretty heavy capital controls and other mechanisms in place including local ownership requirement laws.

In any case, there are many other factors that could influence any countries development starting from simple geographic luck. To assume that it is a self-made problem (or isn't) without argument is not useful.

Then instead of absolute (global) measures, we could look at relative improvement rates instead?