Dambisa Moyo. Photo by canada.2020 via Flickr.

In 2009, Time named Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, among the world’s 100 most influential people. During Hilary term, Mark Longhurst spoke with her about her latest work. The interview below is an edited account of their conversation.

In your latest book, How The West Was Lost, you argue that while the West has lost its competitive edge, Europe and the United States have an opportunity to win it back. What choices must the West make to avoid economic decline?

I think education is first and foremost. All of the fundamental problems that the West faces – education, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and so on – are things that are structural in nature. They are long-term problems that have been eroding capital, labor and productivity over a long period of time. It will take a long time to remedy these things, but those are three examples of things that they could do starting tomorrow in a very credible way.

Your book argues that education, infrastructure and deficit financing are three important priorities. On which factor should the West first focus?

There’s no one thing. You can’t have highly educated people without infrastructure. You can’t pick one. It’s about a portfolio of things. People will need healthcare, people will need education, you have to fund national security. But there has been too much investment in things that are consumption-related. This is fundamentally the problem. They have to move the focus away from consumption goods towards more on investment.

Is the West worth saving, or is the world be better off with a geopolitical shift in power toward emerging economies?

No, absolutely not. No one should rest easy if there is any form of suffering anywhere in the world. The notion that we should just let the US go, or let Europe go, is clearly unfounded. My first book, Dead Aid, touched on exactly this point. It’s not acceptable to let the continent of a billion people go in the way that the world has.

Economists tend to rail against trade protectionism. In your book, you note that the United States and China levy manufacturing and agricultural tariffs and subsidies. What role do you believe protectionism will play in the next fifty years?

To be clear, I am absolutely a supporter of free trade and the movement of capital and labor. But we live in the real world. In the real world, we know that Western countries engage very aggressively in protectionist practices – things like agricultural subsidies to Africa, that lock out African goods. My book is not saying that protectionism is not a good idea. What I am saying is that it’s a nuclear option, and it’s certainly on the table given the fact that a place like the United States has 30 million people who are out of work in the manufacturing sector.

You speak about the political reform that needs to occur in the United States and Europe, if the West wants to win back what it has lost already. How will Western governments begin to initiate the process of political reform?

I’m not a political scientist, or a person who deals in politics. This is obviously very complicated, and in some sense, people may argue, intractable. We have to get past the politics and the cycles. Politics encourages policy-makers to focus on short-term agendas and to not deal with the long term. The more pressure that is brought to bear on developed countries, the greater the demand on these countries to sort out these structural problems.