Developing Countries Shouldn’t Waste This Crisis
If one thing needs to change after the coronavirus, it’s the relationship between the state and migrant workers.
The hardest hit.
Photographer: Yawar Nazir/Getty
As the coronavirus pandemic continues, Bloomberg Opinion will be running features that consider the long-term consequences of the crisis. This column is part of a package on politics and government. For more, see Clive Crook on redefining resilience, Andreas Kluth on the future of the European Union and Jonathan Bernstein on whether the U.S. government can survive the next disaster.
Across the developing world, the defining images of the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic have been of migrant workers: abandoned, angry, starving. In their zeal to control the spread of the new coronavirus, governments have all too often betrayed their most aspirational citizens — those who move from countryside to cities to build better lives for themselves and their families. If one thing has to change for developing nations in coming years, it is this relationship between the internal migrant and the state.
The consequences of neglect have, in this crisis, been horrific. Here in India, tens of thousands of migrant workers packed bus stations soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a weeks-long lockdown across the country. The buses weren’t running, so many started walking home to their villages. For many, the journey would take days; some died on the way. And, just to underline how little such workers matter, when the government extended the lockdown on April 14, migrants were left in the lurch again. Those who gathered at a train station in Mumbai, hoping to make the journey home, were beaten by police.
Similar scenes have transpired across the rest of the developing world, where the informal sector accounts for more than two-thirds of employment. (In India, the figure is closer to 90%.) Migrants usually wind up working in tiny enterprises, or are self-employed, or live off daily wages at construction sites. If they can’t work, they aren’t paid, they can’t eat and they may not be able to make rent. Back home, they can at least hope for a roof over their heads and perhaps a harvest to help bring in.
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It’s remarkable how many countries take these migrants for granted, given that their development model rests on such workers’ shoulders. From the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Arthur Lewis, we know that an apparently inexhaustible pool of cheap rural labor has been the main source of growth in the cities of the developing world. The potential of economies in South Asia and Africa, their outperformance in terms of GDP growth, is born of their demographic advantages — a euphemism for, yes, migrant workers.