Nauru - a tiny South Pacific island nation - holds the dubious distinction of being perhaps the worst model for development in modern history. If you want to know what not to do, study Nauru.
Over the last 100 years, Nauru has gone from a land of tropical forests, teeming reefs and unusually fertile soil to a mined-out wasteland, where even drinking water must be imported. It's veered through every kind of unsustainable development scheme - clearcutting its forests and strip-mining its soil for its phosphate content, setting up a tax haven and offshore-banking industry, and more recently becoming a national security client-state-for-hire and for-profit refugee detention center. Throughout these twists and turns, Nauru has had a government where corruption and incompetance have reached truly epic levels. Despite perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars (no one knows for sure) having passed through the local economy, despite having briefly been the richest nation (per capita) in the world, the natives are now dirt poor, the government is bankrupt, and the nation's future is, bluntly, nonexistant. The Nauruan leaders have developed their country into extinction.
It's a sad story, but a perfect illustration of what top-down development, lack of transparency, globalization and get-rich-quick schemes can do for you. You can hear a great telling of it here, on the program This American Life.
