In 1993, my home country had inflation of 313 000 000 % per month (yes, that's millions and yes that's per month). Average salary was $10/month. More than 50% of people worked in black economy. We had only national (public) banks, all of them were totally non-functional. Corruption was so high it's almost unimaginable for "normal" people in the west - if you needed to visit a doctor, you'd have to bribe him, if you had a traffic ticket you'd just bribe cops, if your kid needed good grades you'd bribe teacher...

28 painful years later - almost 80% of people work regularly, i.e. they are legally employed, inflation is far less than 10% per year, almost everybody has a bank account which costs like $3/month (but almost all banks are now private), averagy salary is $400/month or so, by corruption we're at least in the upper 40% of the world...