From the Great Divergence to South-South divergence

Prof Ewout Frankema of Wageningen University & Research in this voxeu post points to rising divergence in Global South:

The long era of the Great Divergence has come to an end with the rapid economic ascendance of Eastern Asia, and China in particular. But economic historians have yet to define an agenda to analyse the causes and consequences of the rapid, and more recent, economic divergence across the Global South. This column argues that there is an urgent need to focus on this South-South divergence.

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I argue that there is an urgent need to focus on the rapid, and more recent, economic divergence across the Global South. I refer to this new divide as South-South divergence. As the Eurasian gap in economic, industrial, and technological capacity began to shrink, the South began to experience growing disparities in labour productivity and per capita income. This process of South-South divergence is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows the coefficient of variation of per capita GDP in the North and the South since 1950. In the South the income disparities widened, while in the North they narrowed, a trend that was only temporarily interrupted by the disintegration of former communist economies during the 1980s and 1990s. This phenomenon of South-South divergence warrants more attention than it has received thus far.