The decade's central riddle is no longer whether the Global South can grow. It can, and in many places it does. The riddle is whether growth still produces belief.

That sounds abstract until you look at behaviour. When households cut protein before they cut phone data, when graduates pursue exit papers faster than promotions, when elections change leaders without changing the lived feeling of the state, something has shifted beneath the macro story. The spreadsheets are reporting recovery. The public mind is reporting doubt.

This essay names that divergence the mind gap, the widening distance between economic indicators and social confidence. It asks a blunt question that policymakers rarely like to face directly. If the two come into conflict, which breaks first. Growth or belief.

In 2026, belief is increasingly the constraint.

The old bargain was simple. Growth created jobs. Jobs bought patience. Patience legitimised the state. That chain relied on two assumptions. First, that growth reached people through wages, services, and opportunity. Second, that institutions retained enough credibility for citizens to interpret hardship as temporary and effort as worthwhile.

Both assumptions now fail more often than many governments admit.

Trust has become a macro variable, even if most macro models still pretend it is not. In the Edelman Trust Barometer, distrust is tracked explicitly as a structural condition rather than a temporary mood swing, and the report repeatedly frames grievance, fear, and institutional credibility as central to stability and legitimacy.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that 61% of people globally have a moderate or high sense of grievance, defined by a belief that government and business make their lives harder and serve narrow interests, and that wealthy people benefit unfairly from the system. Those with high grievance distrust all four institutions tracked: business, government, media, and NGOs.

More alarming: 4 in 10 people would approve of one or more forms of hostile activism to bring about change—including attacking people online, intentionally spreading disinformation, threatening or committing violence, or damaging public or private property. This sentiment is most prevalent among respondents ages 18-34 (53%).

This matters because belief is not a decorative social sentiment. Belief is compliance without coercion. Belief is investment rather than flight. Belief is staying to build rather than leaving to survive. When belief thins, the same policy produces weaker results. The same tax rate feels like theft. The same price increase feels like betrayal. The same election feels like theatre.

That is how societies can look stable while becoming fragile.

Fragility is not always loud. It is often quiet. The Global South is full of countries that do not collapse even when they should, at least by the textbook. They keep importing, even when currencies weaken. They keep paying debt, even when services degrade. They keep holding elections, even when legitimacy erodes. They keep producing, even when young people hate the bargain.

That resilience is real. It is also misleading. Endurance can be mistaken for consent. Silence can be mistaken for satisfaction. Low protest can be mistaken for calm. A growing share of social pressure has simply found other exits.

One exit is migration, both legal and informal. Another is the informal economy itself. Another is the internal migration from civic life into private survival, where citizens stop asking and start coping. Another is political disengagement that looks like apathy but behaves like a vote of no confidence.

This is why the mind gap is so dangerous. It produces fewer obvious alarms, right up until a trigger arrives and reveals how thin the social floor has become.

The world has been here before. What is different now is the scale, the youth bulge, and the speed of information. Youth is the accelerant of the decade. A young society is not automatically unstable, but it is more sensitive to blocked mobility. When education expands faster than dignified employment, a credential becomes a receipt for disappointment. When housing, transport, and food absorb most of a household budget, the future feels like a narrowing corridor, not an opening horizon.

Labour market data shows how quickly this can become structural. The International Labour Organization documents persistent stress in youth labour markets, including high youth unemployment in several regions and large mismatches between aspiration and available work, with particular strain visible in parts of Asia and the Pacific.

In low-income countries, young people ages 15 to 29 with advanced education are nearly four times more likely to be unemployed compared to those with only basic education. The unemployment rate for youth with advanced degrees reaches 21% compared to 5.8% for those with basic education. For young adults in low- and middle-income countries, the benefits of tertiary education emerge in employment quality rather than quantity.

In that environment, belief becomes the scarce resource.

There is a fiscal side to this story, and it is not subtle. Debt service is not just a finance ministry problem. It is a legitimacy problem, because debt service competes directly with visible human investment. When a government pays creditors on time while hospitals run out of basics, citizens learn the hierarchy of the state without anyone needing to explain it.

Recent reporting on World Bank figures captured the squeeze bluntly. Developing countries paid a record foreign debt service bill in 2023, with interest costs rising sharply and budgets tightening for health and education in many places.

The data is stark. Developing countries spent $1.4 trillion to service their foreign debt in 2023 as interest costs climbed to a 20-year high. Interest payments surged by nearly a third to $406 billion, squeezing budgets in critical areas such as health, education, and the environment.

For the poorest countries eligible to borrow from the World Bank's IDA, debt service reached a record $96.2 billion in 2023. Although principal repayments decreased nearly 8%, interest costs surged to an all-time high of $34.6 billion—four times the amount a decade ago. Interest payments now amount to nearly 6% of export earnings, a level not seen since 1999.

Global public debt reached a record $102 trillion in 2024. Developing countries' net interest payments on public debt reached $921 billion in 2024, a 10% increase from 2023. A record 61 developing countries allocated 10% or more of government revenues to interest payments.

Most damning: 3.4 billion people now live in countries that spend more on debt interest than on either health or education. Between 2020 and 2023, 165 million people fell into poverty as debt servicing crowded out social protection, health, and education expenditures.

The United Nations has been warning in parallel that debt burdens are forcing many developing countries into painful tradeoffs that crowd out social spending, trapping populations in a cycle where the state is present but not protective.

When those tradeoffs persist, belief is taxed. In a healthy social contract, sacrifice can be tolerated if the direction feels fair and the leadership feels accountable. In a damaged social contract, sacrifice is interpreted as extraction. The same austerity becomes either discipline or humiliation, depending on trust.

This is why 2026 is not just an economic year. It is a perception year.

It is also a year of repeated political rituals that no longer reset legitimacy. Across much of the Global South, elections increasingly function as rotation without renewal. Parties swap slogans, coalitions reshuffle, dynasties reappear under new branding, and the administrative machine remains the same. Infrastructure does not noticeably improve for ordinary districts. Utilities remain unreliable. Food security remains exposed. Gatekeeping remains normal. Corruption remains selective. Religion and identity remain the easiest instruments for mobilisation because they are cheaper than delivery.

When citizens observe this cycle long enough, they stop treating elections as a mechanism for change and start treating them as a mechanism for managing disappointment. That does not mean people do not care. It means they care with less hope.

The mind gap also explains why governments can win elections without gaining legitimacy. Victory can be produced through fragmented opposition, polarisation, and turnout patterns, even while belief continues to drain away. It explains why regimes can appear stable until a specific insult, scandal, shortage, or policy shock turns resignation into anger. It explains why states that look strong on paper can become brittle in practice.

So what breaks first.

Growth rarely breaks first, because growth is now often engineered to survive social dissatisfaction. Growth can be sustained through exports, commodities, remittances, tourism enclaves, and low wage competitiveness, even if domestic belief is thinning. Growth can also be sustained by pushing more of life into private coping, where households fill gaps that the state does not.

Belief breaks first because belief is expensive to maintain. It requires services that work. It requires rules that apply. It requires wages that feel connected to effort. It requires a future that feels reachable. It requires institutions that do not look like closed clubs.

Once belief breaks, the economy does not instantly collapse. Something subtler happens first. Participation becomes minimal. People comply, but they do not commit. They work, but they do not innovate. They pay, but they do not trust. They stay, but they plan to leave. They vote, but they expect nothing.

That is not a moral crisis. It is an economic one.

A society running on minimal belief becomes slower, leakier, more corrupt, more anxious, and harder to govern without force. Productivity suffers not only because skills are missing, but because motivation is rationally withdrawn. Investment shifts from building to hedging. Savings shift from local currency into anything that escapes local risk. Talent becomes portable. The state becomes a manager of pressure rather than a builder of possibility.

That is how the mind gap converts into a growth problem later. In other words, belief breaks first, and growth pays the bill afterward.

The practical task for 2026 is therefore not to chase growth headlines. It is to rebuild the credibility link between expansion and lived progress.

That rebuild is not mystical. It is painfully concrete. It is waiting times in clinics, not speeches about health. It is buses that run, not slogans about mobility. It is classrooms that teach, not enrolment numbers. It is permits that take days, not months. It is predictable policing, not performative crackdowns. It is budgets that visibly prioritise people, not prestige.

A government that restores belief does not need to be loved. It needs to be trusted enough that effort feels rational again.

This is the stability test of 2026. Not whether the Global South grows, but whether growth remains believable. If belief remains the constraint, the danger is not one dramatic collapse. The danger is a decade of quiet exits, slow corrosion, and sudden ruptures that surprise everyone who only watched the numbers.

And in that world, the first crisis does not arrive in bond spreads. It arrives in the moment ordinary citizens, across very different countries, independently reach the same conclusion.

This system will continue, but it will not include me.