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Paper short abstract:

This paper employs the case of Rwanda to show how domestic political vulnerabilities have shaped the country's externally dependent economic development strategy. The resulting external dependence reminds us of the precarious nature of 21st century late development.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)-led government has led the country through a period of miracle growth. This has led observers from a wide range of methodological and ideological positions - from the World Bank to heterodox development scholars - to applaud the country's progress. While a large chunk of academic literature questions the country's democratic credentials and human rights record, there is comparatively little analysis of how Rwanda's growth has compared with East Asian developmental states and other rapidly growing African countries. Rwanda's growth success has been substantially different from that of past developers: there is limited manufacturing growth and there are very few signs of the emergence of a domestic capitalist class . This paper argues that Rwanda's externally-dependent strategy has done little to address balance-of-payment (BoP) constraints, which are the central characteristic of late developing countries and most former colonies. The continued salience of BoP constraints becomes more difficult to address given dependence on external actors and the continued difficulties of promoting effective state-business relations domestically. This paper works in a structuralist tradition to show how the challenges of contemporary late development have become increasingly externally dependent. This is because without governments retaining access to domestic capital or working closely with a domestic capitalist class, development strategies are inevitably dependent on finance and legitimacy from external capital whether foreign governments or multinational capital.