Are Charter Cities the answer?

A few weeks ago, thanks to an economics assignment that I was working on, I came across the concept of Charter Cities, birthed by Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer.

To better understand this revolutionary concept, I highly recommend watching Romer's illuminating TED talk on the subject:

A Charter City, simply put, is a semi-autonomous city within a nation that typically follows a different set of rules from those of the parent nation. More specific to Romer’s idea, the city ought to be set up on a vast, uninhabited piece of land, allowing for investors to come in to build infrastructure, firms to set up shop and provide jobs, workers to come in and take those jobs, and families to come in and give the city life.

Through the concept of charter cities, Romer hopes to attack global poverty through one of its most tenacious vectors: culture.

Over the years, as I reflected more on sub-Saharan Africa’s dire economic situation, I came to appreciate just how big a role our own culture played in holding us back from prosperity. For example, the prevalence of—and the normalcy with which we treat—corruption, the practice of fathers marrying off otherwise intelligent and productive daughters who would have better-served the economy by getting an education and filling critical jobs, and the tendency for parents to birth more children than they can realistically take care of—transferring most of the burden to their firstborn sons. And the list goes on.

And in quizzing many an adult on where we were going wrong as Africans, with each “why”, their tree of reasoning tapered down to this root cause. This whole exercise, however, left a bad aftertaste in their mouth upon the realisation that the answer wasn’t indeed black and white but—rather—a manifold spectrum of hues of grey.

The problem of sub-Saharan Africa’s underdevelopment seemed unsolvable, with many hypothesizing a revolution—one in which many lives would be lost, but with the overall net benefit of widespread prosperity and development stemming from the adoption of new, “winning” values.

However, a revolution might not be necessary to stimulate the much-needed change we seek.

What if there were was a way we could adopt the “winning” values without any concomitant bloodshed?

And that’s where charter cities come in.

Romer gave a very insightful explanation on the central role Hong-Kong(essentially, a charter city governed by the British Empire) played in the economic transformation of China. While the Chinese people for a long time knew that a free market would incentivise production and ameliorate the food shortages that were plaguing the nation at the time, there was a deep-seated conservatism across the populace towards adopting more free-market ideals. However, Deng Xiaoping—after seeing the sheer success Hong-Kong had become— had the genius insight of allowing for the winning values of Hong-Kong to seep through the rest of mainland China through the formation of special economic zones where natives could, on their own accord, interact with Hong-Kong from a safe distance. These areas, as a result, grew rapidly and transformed the Chinese economy as we know it today. You’ve probably heard of some of these cities: Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc.

While I admit that this oversimplifies the complex story of China’s rise, it does point to an essential ingredient that, perhaps, nations in a similar situation today as China was a few decades ago should seriously consider.

How about, for example, we gave the island of Pembe (off the coast of Tanzania)—or any one of the many scarcely habited islands or swaths of land on the African coast—to a country with “winning values”—say Canada, or South Korea—and allowed for the free movement of the African country’s citizens to and from this territory. Canada, or whichever country, would then be responsible for everything else: the judicial and legislative system, the infrastructure, and anything else that would be essential to set up the city. What Romer posits, and what I hope, would happen is that we would have this Dubai-Esque city somewhere in Africa, where the roads were clean and the wages were four times what you would ideally get in your current location. This would cause the most ambitious to immediately journey towards this city and clamour for these coveted jobs and, in so doing, set off a chain reaction of explosive economic growth with spillover effects benefitting the neighbouring cities.

I do contend that this simulation is very idealised and pays no tribute whatsoever to the neocolonialist undertones that this method elicits—or even the assumption that high-rise buildings are the defacto standard for economic progress.

However, as with all ideas in their infant stages, idealising them is key—lest they are quickly discarded as impractical without an in-depth SWOT analysis on them.

I hope that, by sharing this idea with you, I am planting a seed that you’ll continue to nourish with ponderation and propagate to fellow fertile minds whenever you get the chance, in the hopes that, two decades down the road, even if we don’t get a charter city in Africa, we might at least come up with a better solution.

As for now, I’m completely sold on the potential of this idea.