LI E GOSTEI (8)

Countries today can choose to be prosperous. One of the most damaging myths of our times is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them. There is no better philosophy than that for keeping them in a state of backwardness for all time to come. Because today that theory is false. In the past, to be sure, prosperity depend almost exclusively on geography and power. But the internationalization of modern life — of markets, of technology, of capital — permits any country, even the smallest one with the fewest resources, if it opens out to the world and organizes its economy on a competitive basis, to achieve rapid growth.

Mario Vargas Llosa, A Fish in the Water