Things used to be so simple. Back in the 1960s Simon Kuznets, the great scholar who more or less invented the discipline of development economics, used to tell students there were four sorts of countries: underdeveloped, developed, Japan and Argentina.

At the time, Japan was rapidly hauling itself from the first category to the second, while Argentina was apparently attempting the unorthodox manoeuvre of climbing from the third world to the first and then falling back again.

These days Professor Kuznets’s -simple typology would be laughed out of any development economics con-ference – which itself would now be called a forward-looking multi-stakeholder con-s-ultation on emerging paradigms of inclusive global -governance. We might not be 100 per cent sure how poor countries become rich ones but, by God, we have plenty of ways of pigeon---holing them while they are trying.