After approximately 60 years of African independence, many African villages are today no better off than when power was handed over by the European colonial authorites. West African agriculture in particular, the mainstay of the West African village, is at the bottom rung of world agriculture. The Development Game was initiated as a model of a rural, agricultural, land-rich African village operating at or near subsistence and under conditions of communal ownership of land, with an initial population of 1000 inhabitants. The village is composed entirely of farmers. Age structure is ignored, and no provision is made for reduced earnings in childhood and old age. In particular everyone is assumed to have the potential for at least a subsistence income. Although in practice in a typical African village, the very young and very old might not work, a large percentage of the population, larger than in urban areas, would be in the labour force, principally in farming. Net migration is assumed zero. External investment and assistance are assumed zero during the period under investigation, although an initial cash or capital equipment injection can be specified by the user. The model makes provision for user selection of population growth rate, capital investment rate,  return on investment and depreciation rate, and assuming these key indicators to remain constant the model calculates economic performance over a 100-year period.

The growth of population, total income, income per capita, total capital investment and capital investment per capita are charted, providing a dramatic illustration of our imaginary village's progress over a 100-year period. The Development Game does not predict the future. Obviously, population growth rates and the other key indicators depend on many factors, and can and do change with time in real-life situations. What the model does do, however, is calculate what direction our village is headed if the user-selected conditions were to remain constant. The Development Game focusses on capital investments as the means of economic growth. In the rural African setting there are other means to achieve economic growth: improved planting and soil management techniques, improved seed varieties, increased use of fertilizer etc. These do not necessarily involve capital equipment investments. However, by definition, the farmer without capital equipment is assumed to be at subsistence, whatever dollar level that may be. The Development Game assumes that these other growth opportunities are held constant during the period under analysis.

The Development Game readily demonstrates why normal economic growth figures tend to range in a narrow band around zero. The three economic indicators used are widely studied and monitored, and normally fall within certain narrow ranges.  One suspects that the average African rural farmer would be well pleased if he could get his equipment, even basic equipment, to last ten years (ie 10% depreciation, frequently used in global accounting) in conditions where access to power, spare parts and skilled technicians may be poor. Return on investment surely can go no higher than 33% on a long-term, consistent basis: many industrialists and farmers around the world would be delighted to realise sufficient profit from their new equipment to recover its cost in three years. Investment ratios would in practice perhaps show the greatest variation. Many factors apart from those mentioned above could influence this: the communal socio-economic system assumed in this model has often been blamed for low investment in the African village and in Africa there would perhaps be differences even among national/ethnic groups, some more thrifty than others. Data on the investment rate indicator from rural African villages might be hard to find, but looked at on a global level, where this indicator has been extensively studied, investment ratios in the industrialised world have ranged from 15% (US) to 30% (Japan) of GNP. It would have to be a very, very dedicated group of African village farmers indeed who would forego consumption and spend 50%, say, of their hard-won income above subsistence on capital investments.

Looked at in this light, and plugging in reasonable numbers for the indicators, it quickly becomes evident that per capita income growth is not easy to achieve. The theory accords with extensive experience in Africa over the last 60 years! At subsistence, internal investment is zero by definition, and growth is impossible. In the region close to subsistence, the key investment rate indicator is likely to be low, inhibiting prospects for growth. Is our village doomed then to subsistence? Can nothing be done to change these hopeless prospects? How then have others escaped the self-propagating pit of subsistence? After all, the equations apply not just to Africa but much more generally, to all similar communities all over the world and over the centuries. How did they manage to grow? The argument has been made that a principal mechanism for building the capital to escape subsistence was slavery and its variants. Plantation slaves were a form of capital, odious as this was, steadily built up over the years, and later replaced by investments in capital equipment that could only have been possible through the earnings from slave labour. Thus slavery not only allowed the building of capital, but its abolition provided the impetus for the development of capital equipment. In other jurisdictions, conquest and plunder served the same purpose. We are straying far off the thrust of these notes, but suffice it to say that the peaceful, communal systems we are attempting to model here are the antithesis of slavery.

There are perhaps some dim rays of hope in an apparently dismal African outlook. As mentioned earlier, the Development Game focusses on investments in capital equipment and ignores so-called human capital development, so this is one area where the model and the practice might make gains. Some economists have focussed on population control as a key to third world economic gains; China for many years adopted a one-child policy that brought its population growth rate down, with great effort, by less than 1% in the thirty-five years of the policy from 1980 (albeit from already relatively low levels following previous birth control efforts). But the Development Game shows that reductions in the depreciation rate can have a greater effect than similar decreases in the population growth rate. Improvements in the depreciation rate might be easier to achieve and of considerably greater magnitude than changes in the population growth rate. A poorly-maintained vehicle might last 5 years (20% depreciation) whilst a patiently-maintained one might last more than 20 years (5% depreciation). Thus, a careful program to identify and procure cost-effective farm equipment, provision of spare parts possibly including local manufacture, and training of an army of farm equipment technicians might reduce the depreciation rate by several percentage points, far more than could be achieved with population control measures.

Certainly results from the Development Game need to be analyzed and corroborated. Certainly some results will be unrealistic, especially at the boundaries of normal human experience. If you set our village on a path to extinction by making the death rate higher than the birth rate, strange results can ensue if people expire faster than capital, and the capital per capita rises to astronomical levels. Before the demise our last remaining villagers become fantastically wealthy. Capital equipment of course requires human control, so the reality would be somewhat different!

The Development Game uses basic economic indicators and simple mathematical relationships to develop its trends. Although the African village situation was the focus of attention, the underlying indicators and maths have wider applicability. The game could be modified and extended to more closely fit real-life experience.