Rene:

To be honest, upon first seeing your post, I was almost overwhelmed by a bunch of undecipherable economic jargon not understandable to a mere mortal like me.

But then again, upon applying common logic, I could not help but notice that your thesis was on the development of Taiwan in the 50s and 60s.  I believe Taiwan was one of the countries which the regime modeled their 2020 Vision Plan.  Furthermore, the APRC regime has enjoyed particularly favorable relations with the rogue Taiwanese government.  It is therefore not surprising that she would be upheld as model country by the ruling power in The Gambia.

While I am no neo-classical economics enthusiast, I know that Taiwan was a special case in itself.  Taiwan, as a result of circumstance and other factors, was an ideal dependant trading partner of the Capitalist World, particularly the USA.  Conditions which are not present in The Gambia presently.

Taiwan was colonized by a bunch of foreign countries but as I understand it, Japan during it's occupation of the country made Taiwan a breadbasket.  The agricultural and basic infrastructure was therefore put in place.  Furthermore, the Korean war and the potential for it to be an ally against the Red Menace (China), made her a strategic military and trading partner.  The populace as has been in many Asian states was also highly educated.  These conditions combined with massive amount of aid from the US are the pre-conditions which allowed Taiwan to transform a primarily agricultural economy to become a player in the high tech world market.

Compare these pre-conditions then to those in The Gambia right now and it becomes apparent we are comparing apples and oranges.  Economics is not an exact science and we cannot make projections and extrapolations like in Mathematics.

Anyway, maybe I was a bit harsh in my condemnation of a fisheries plants as white elephants and such.  Buy how can I not be skeptical of the regime in power getting anything right? Despite all the promises, what industry has the government built for which they can show concrete results?

Like Taiwan, the present regime should focus on more pending matters like improving the state of agricultutre, education, health, freedom of speech, corruption etc etc, before having any big aspirations of an industraiul revolution.

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