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The Underdeveloped of Muslim Countries: An Economical Reasoning

The Underdeveloped of Muslim Countries: An Economical Reasoning

In this article, I would like to discuss from an economical perspective why Muslim majority counties around the world are not developed enough. First of all, we must realize that to achieve prosperity in society we must tackle the fundamental aspect called organizing the market effectively and efficiently.

In this vein, someone who is interested in making society level up needs a broad range of ideas about organizing society. But these ideas necessarily are accompanied by what we know about reality. At the institutional level, this idea manifested in governmental policies because they have the legitimate power to organize society.

When we look back at historical books, the fact tells us that society is a change or at least transforming into a new one. If in the past times economy has been driven by agricultural production, right now we see mass production take place not only in the factory but also within informational technology. Obviously, it is brought a lot of challenges and problems regarding how we organize economic dimensions of society.

I suppose that why Muslim majority countries relatively backward in an economical sense is because they don’t pay enough attention to these challenges. In the other words, they have nothing to know about how to build standards of living. And this problem worsening since structural transformation encourages people to fulfil and compete in living standards.

For example, the ICT revolution made the smartphone function enormous within our daily life. The question is what do the Muslim majority countries do to take advantage of this revolution? Nothing at all. All of them tend to adapt to this new circumstance. Consequently, Muslims are nothing other than consumers par excellence.

Nevertheless, I believe that Muslims have ability to lead the world's future more equal and fairer. But it pre requires a bounce of things to do. The matter that I think is basic is that we must learn historically from the advanced country's experiences that are able to perform effective and efficient economic organization.

This is matter because it provided knowledge about a kind of way to improve revenue and manage the market. This is what classical economists such as Adam Smith try to comprehend. Interestingly, this spirit to coup economic knowledge has been inherited by generations after them.

Consequently, Western Europe gradually build a more organized society structurally as well as culturally. This do not what we find in Muslim majority counties.

Someone may argue that colonialism is the reason behind the advance of Western countries because they extract a lot of material resources from the global south to gain financial abundance. Then, this finance surplus supports society to transform itself through policies, development, and a broad range of incentives. Sure, I don’t deny that.

Indeed, I am also aware of the time advantage of Western countries to build their society. But I must stress that Muslim countries have a different kind of advantage called the power of late development. The path of Muslim counties to build society can be leapt forward without following but considering the trajectory of the other countries. This is the big project that Muslim countries must handle right now.

When we get demographic data the population of Muslims in the world is around 1.9 billion. Despite Muslim spread around the world, most of the population is in Asia and North Africa. Unfortunately, countries in this region tend to organize their economy with extractive production and their fix global commodity is crude oil, palm oil, and raw material. This condition made the state policy seems heavy and concentrated.

Read also: Why are Muslim Societies Underdeveloped?

One of the reasons is business elites that operate extractive production gain power because they control vital economic sector and source of national revenue. In turn, the character of public policy is influenced or at least not disrupt their interests. This is bad for the whole society because they don’t allow to made innovation.

Penulis:

Editor: Erniyati Khalida

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