I apologize if this comes across as ignorant, but I don't know how to pose this question without it seeming a tad racist. Basically, the Spanish Empire and British Empire colonized the majority of countries in South America, Africa, and south and east Asia at some point or the other since 1492.
Just around the 1890's China was a falling world power and many European countries were carving out chunks of it. Then later China was conquered during World War II by Japan. Yet today somehow China has risen to the top.
This is similar with India in that they have managed to find a way to boom after only two generations of non-British India.
Korea and Japan were also very poor, struggling countries even as late as the 20th century, yet they have somehow risen to the top as well.
My question is why have countries in Africa and Latin America continued to struggle? I realize this comes from a Euro and somewhat Asiacentric education growing up in the US and all. And if there are many thriving countries in Africa and South America that I failed to make note of, please enlighten me.
From an economic standpoint, I find your assertion that Latin America is suffering when compared to the other countries you mentioned confusing. China and India have both experienced high levels of growth over the past decades, but it is important to keep in mind that high growth doesn't always translate into high standards of living and that having a large economy (especially in highly populous countries) does not mean that the average citizens of that country are well off. Using a number of indicators, we can see that Latin America as a whole is much wealthier than either of India or China and that Latin Americans enjoy a much higher standard of living.
GDP per capita is a measure of how much income there is per person in any given country. Look at this table (data taken from wiki) comparing the countries you've mentioned in terms of average income:
Korea, South 30,011
Chile 21,468
Uruguay 18,280
Argentina 18,200
Venezuela 17,951
Panama 16,946
Mexico 16,426
Brazil 14,551
Costa Rica 13,320
Colombia 11,892
Peru 11,805
LatAM and Carib Overall 11,770
Dominican Republic 11,208
Ecuador 10,073
China 9,844
El Salvador 7,575
Paraguay 7,342
Guatemala 7,112
Bolivia 5,749
Honduras 4,500
Nicaragua 4,328
India 4,077
You'll note several things:
You seem to be wondering why Asian countries have been more successful than their Latin American and African counterparts in the postcolonial era. I, however, would argue that the facts do not necessarily support that claim. Rather than attributing modern economic trends to geographic or ethnic differences, it seems more accurate to say that much of the variation is better explained by differences in economic policy and investments governments have made in building infrastructure and other fields.
EDIT: I moved my extended reply below to my top level comment so that it doesn't get buried:
Let me answer a slightly modified version of OP's original question: What were the causes of economic growth in China, India, and Korea? I'll tackle each country separately.
China: China's economy was in shambles after the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping pushed for economic reforms in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. He expanded the role of market forces in the Chinese economy, dismantled Maoist communes, welcomed foreign investment in China, and established "special economic zones" that increased FDI (Foreign Direct Investment). Reforms were briefly interrupted by the Tiananmen protests, which strengthened conservatives within the Chinese Communist Party, but resumed shortly after. The reforms and China's large population of young, educated workers transformed the country into a manufacturing powerhouse with a rapidly growing economy. SOEs (state-owned enterprises) still make up a large part of the Chinese economy, but government policies are increasing the role of the private sector.
Korea: Korea was still mostly an agriculture-based economy after World War II. Under President Park Chung Hee, policies were enacted to transform South Korea into an industrialized country. The government worked together with the chaebols, family-controlled business conglomerates to modernize the country. The government welcomed foreign loans and, like China currently, focused on manufacturing. Korea moved up the value chain over the decades towards manufacturing more advanced electronics. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis wiped out some of the chaebols, but the Korean economy rebounded. Chaebols still play an important part of the economy (think LG and Samsung), but the number of mid-sized corporations has also grown.
India: India began reforms to liberalize its economy roughly a decade after China in the 1990s. India didn't follow the East Asian model of development through manufacturing, so its economic growth has been mostly based on its service sector rather than its industrial sector.
The economic growth of China, India, and Korea has everything to do with policies in the latter half of the 20th century, not because of or in spite of colonialism. China had gone through the collapse of its last imperial dynasty, World War II, a massive civil war, and decades under Mao prior to Deng's economic reforms.
Books on modern China: Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China, Henry Kissinger's On China, and others. Most of what I know from Korea and India comes from various lectures and articles on foreign affairs.
The current issue of the Economist has a special report on business in Asia, which is very readable. It covers past reforms and the current status of Asian economic reforms.
Original comment
The entirety of China was never colonized by Japan. Imperial Japan only managed to take control of the northeast (map), while the KMT retreated to the southwest. Imperial Japan never managed to defeat the KMT and all the territories taken during WWII were returned to the ROC after the conclusion of the war.
Chinese and Korea weren't colonized by Western powers in the same sense that India, most of Africa, South America, and a large part of Southeast Asia were. Korea was a Japanese colony. Western powers created "spheres of influence" in southern China and Manchuria, but true Western colonies in China were restricted to Hong Kong, Macau, Kwangchowan, and parts of Shandong.
I can't speak to Latin America, but in Africa, the inertia of the colonial relationship was remarkable; it continues today in many areas, and is particularly visible economically in the form of the CFA Franc zones relative to France. In brief, the new governments of Africa needed capital, and followed development plans along existing colonial lines; wherever they tried to break away from those lines, it tended to be disastrously grandiose in scale, and the debt cycle--a tremendously misunderstood albatross--continues to destroy revenue and reward corruption from above. The major exceptions usually exist in places where, as you might expect, some kind of stable revenue stream was at least moderately adequate (think Botswana here) to inoculate the state against the vagaries of international commodity markets and underwrite the necessary but not glorious work of infrastructural growth. It also helps when internal factionalism isn't tugging at the very fabric of the state, which is a problem in entities that don't share a strong, common sense of national identity (Nigeria, away from the cities, is a case in point--especially the division between north and south). James Ferguson's Global Shadows is an interesting commentary on global investment patterns in postcolonial Africa as well, and points to the real problem with economics involving concessions and "thin investment" by extractive industry that generates no real growth, and keeps Africa [edit: on the whole; it is of course not just one place] in the position of precarious primary production.
It's interesting you characterize China and India as "thriving." Given the hundreds of millions living in absolute squalor in both countries, it's only a certain stratum that realizes these benefits as of yet (you might add Indonesia to that list, as well). We tend to look at these things as being uniform across nations by aggregate GDP and certain other total metrics, but that hides the enormous class divides within countries that we eye warily in the US, like China or India.
A quick nit-pick: I think the much more useful question to ask is why did some post-colonial powers (mostly but not all concentrated around East Asia) thrive, as opposed to why some didn't, because the latter is getting into blame-shifting for what were nations in incredibly difficult circumstances unable of being able to perform what were nothing short of miracles (I mean never in human history were so many people lifted out of absolute poverty in such a short amount of time as post-Cultural Revolution China) and also ignores the amount of progress made in what we think of as unsuccessful developing states (I mean, South Africa basically lead an initiative to eradicate polio from all but the most culturally recalcitrant parts of central Africa - I think that's an amazing success. North Africa managed to unite to literally hold back to growth of the Sahara and begin reclaiming the desert with expand forests - I think that's also an amazing success).
This is a similar nit-pick I have when people ask questions like "why didn't China/The Ottoman Empire/India industrialize" or something like that - like why didn't all these separate places undergo a once-in-history event?
Just because a country is no longer formally a colony, that doesn't mean that they're truly independent. A quick glance at the last 150 years of history for any Central American country would quickly disabuse you of that notion. Nothing will retard a country's development like thirty years of civil war, funded by outside powers. I've been to Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, and they are recovering, but there are still lots of security and corruption issues that have yet to be resolved.
Compare them to Costa Rica, which has largely been left alone to develop in peace, and the difference is night and day.
I mean there is a significant assumption that India and China are thriving. Are they relevant on the world stage because of total GDP? Yes but that is more a product of their population. Per capita gdp in the majority of Latin American countries is well above China and India. Thus the sample is diminished and you're left with just the tigers (korea ,singapore etc..) and Japan. As for them, there is no easy answer a lot of it is luck, and strong institutions.
Not all of them are. Chile is in the OECD and Brazil is an emerging economic player. South America is a very diverse place economically, culturally, and ethnically. You have rich Chile next to very poor Bolivia just like rich China is next to very poor nepal. Also much of Southeast Asia is not rich at all though it is industrializing due to increasing wages in China shifting low end production their way.
I think the question behind the question being asked here is something along the lines of "Why is colonialism (specifically European colonialism) still blamed for the majority of the ills of the third world countries?" I don't think it is an underestimation to say that modern Europe (and the U.S. for that matter) has a good deal of hand-wringing guilt over this issue.
The answer to this question is economic, not political nor directly related to colonialism, and the difference can be summed up in two acronyms: ISI and EOI.
ISI is Import Substitution Industrialization. Coming from Marxist-influenced Dependency Theory, advocates of ISI proposed that the structure of the global economy is inherently exploitative of developing countries who don't have the advanced industrial and manufacturing sectors that the "developed world" has. In the 1980s, the major proponents of ISI were Latin American nations, who saw it as necessary to break the cycle of exploitation and create their own manufacturing/industrial sectors. To do this they raised import tariffs and barriers, preventing the developed world from flooding their economies with cheap manufactured goods, and instead gave enormous subsidies to domestic manufacturing industries in an attempt to compete with those of the developed world. What ultimately happened was that these countries ended up with enormously high loans, internal inequality and ultimately financial instability and bankruptcy, forcing them into loans from the IMF etc - Bolivia and Argentina are excellent examples.
At the other end of the spectrum is EOI - Export Oriented Industrialization. This was model of development based on one idea: that to make money for the country, you have to sell things that other countries want. The countries that adopted this strategy initially, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, did things like lowering the value of their currency and lowering their trade barriers making it cheap to import raw materials, that they would then manufacture into finished goods. These countries very quickly climbed the "value chain", first manufacturing textiles, then basic consumer goods, then industrial goods like automobiles and then high-tech things like electronics. The second wave of Asian industrialization consists primarily of China, but also includes countries like Thailand and Vietnam, who are attempting to pursue this same path. I don't have too much knowledge of South Asia, but India is known for its degree of decentralization - it doesn't have country-wide industrialization policies like China or Japan but rather individual regions, cities, and ethnic groups pursue their own paths.
Kofi Annan (former SG of the UN) in his memoir argues that the key reason for the development and lack of development, of post-colonial economies, particularly in Africa, is fundamentally due to leadership. It does not perhaps entirely answer your question but I hope it helps in regards to Africa.
Annan recognises that colonialism was "destructive and divisive", that many African countries are landlocked and so denied the "vital economic asset" of seaborne trade routes " - which many economists emphasise as an essential part of the explanation for Africa's previous poor economic performance".
But to "blame colonialism alone", he says, is inaccurate and "irresponsible". Annan argues that leadership is truly the "lynchpin" of modern African history. He goes on to evaluate the problem with comparisons of post-colonial countries.
Ghana and Malaysia. Both won independence in 1957 and both had apparently similar economic prospects. Malaysia's per capita income was actually lower than Ghana's - at $270 compared to $390. Malaysia constructed a framework of parliamentary government that formed the basis of a strong political system under which economic growth could be fostered. Ghana rather experienced a cycle of military coups from 1966, "allowing the government only a sputtering process of political institutional development". Today Malaysia has a per capita income approximately thirteen times larger than Ghana's. Annan writes that "the nub of the problem is African leadership and African institutions".
Madagascar. It was free from the economic curse of being landlocked and unstable borders. In the late 1990s, Madagascar took advantage of the US's African Growth and Opportunity Act which offered benefits for African exports. A special 'export-processing zone' was created and effective government policies were implemented, and as a result 300,000 jobs were created.
However, when Vice-Admiral Didier Ratsiraka lost an election he blockaded the port for 8 months. He killed off the export-processing zone, which "otherwise may have come to create a striking example of how a very poor African country could break into the world market".
Africa has had the experience it has, most of all, because of the decisions made by individuals and the systems of rule deliberately enacted by leaders and their supporters.
The UN Africa Report of 1998 (commissioned by Kofi Annan) noted the impact of colonialism, but as a peripheral historical factor among many, and meanwhile emphasised the failures of Africans and their leaders as much as anything else. The failure of Africa to advance at the same rate of other post-colonial countries is put down to, in Annan's words, military regimes.
The perversion of democratic rule, gross abuses of human rights, and economic mismanagement stem in so many instances from this one infection: the military coup.
Kofi Annan, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace (2012)
How can GDP per capita calculate wealth of people in latin american countries? which most people here are trying to do..... when it's quite clear that most of the wealth in those countries are in hands of few elite rich !? If total GDP is $100 and 5 people live there that makes GDP per capita 20 but one person take $95 so in truth people are still poor.
Afrika has even today a problem with external powers having a huge influence to preserve ressources. The EU as well as China trying to influence politics with success. A younger example are french troups in Mauritania stabilized the Government against islamists. This was just the half truth, because the Touareg are a minority and went rogue because of scamming of the former government and allied with islamists. Many african countries have a trade agreement with the EU in favor for the EU, which lead in countries like Mauritania to unemployed craftmen, because the production for example of shoes are cheaper in Europe.
Africa delivers ressources but can't compete on production, because of the missing finances to build a efficient production. In countries like Nigeria the elite isn't interested into investments, because they get their money from oil.
Can Latin American countries be described as colonized, given that they were founded primarily by colonizers?
Some reasons include Mis management of the Economy by African, with help of Swiss Bankers back in the 1970 1980 and when banking laws became transparent in Europe Countries like the U.K spain etc. Also a good example will be a system ( Like France designed) skewed to enrich former colonial masters... There are 14 African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax For the Benefits of Slavery and Colonization http://www.siliconafrica.com/france-colonial-tax/ and high interest rate from IMF that burdens economies as well as economic sabotage in the case of Zimbabwe by britain...
