Tell that to wallmart. But you dodged the central point: basket case countries don't HAVE their labor exploited by anyone, because their labor is worthless.
Nonsense. It's used to provide cheap raw materials.
But it is true that there's a big difference between today and the old colonialism. It's better today, far better. And also, these countries are far more efficient at producing raw materials, because they have at least a little bit of freedom.
I strongly believe that with even more freedom, we'd have even more use of them though. But short-sighted interests want to keep these countries as cheap providers of raw materials (and fear their competition for more advanced products).
In other words, it is our trade barriers, NOT their home countries debts, which led to this particular unfortunate situation.
Nah. The poorest countries are probably those that have the
least trade barriers. I don't know of one single developed country that did not use trade barriers during its industrialisation. Could you name one?
Of course, trade barriers by itself does not guarantee development. But it seems to be pretty much a necessary condition.
How? Your story makes no mention of the role of debt, only of trade barriers (which I think IS a way that developed economies hurt developing economies, though they do it for domestic reasons, not in order to hurt those economies).
Of course the
aim is not to hurt these countries, it's just the outcome.
"Sweatshops" which employ locals (the norm) can only get employees to work for them because the available alternatives are actually WORSE.
Most escaped slaves returned "voluntarily" too, because it was damned hard to survive in any other way. I don't believe in the "epsilon improvement" doctrine.
And as the economies where they are improve, education levels improve, infrastructure improves, their labor becomes more valuable, and working conditions improve over time. Which is exactly what's going on in China.
Sure. But this is also because they had a concerted plan to actually build a competitive industry offering something more advanced than fruit cases. And to do this, they first needed to sell those products at home, because, let's face it, the first car model or game console you produce is not likely to take the world by storm. In fact, China isn't there quite yet in either of these two areas - but they are working on it, and their trade barriers in these areas is what allows them to keep trying.
It was precisely China's relaxation of many of those controls which led to its economic boom, and it will have to continue to relax them in order to continue its stellar growth.
No, and yes. First they used controls to develop a competitive industry. When their product could compete in the global market, they reduced barriers of trade. But only in those areas where they felt that they could compete. This will no doubt continue. Just lowering trade barriers would have been fatal. It has been tried so many times, it never worked.
Japan was essentially a top-ranking country to begin with, and only had to recover from the destruction of infrastructure (an infinitely easier problem than trying to build functioning social capital out of disfunction).
It was hardly top-ranking. It was that not long ago that "japanese" was a synonym for "cheap, low quality". They used their barriers of trade too, and it served them well.
I don't know too much about South Korea, but I seriously doubt its protectionism helped.
It did. You think the first generation of Korean cars would have done well on the world market? You think it would have done well on the
Korean market, if foreign cars had been allowed to compete equally? Their industry would have died in infancy.
Protectionism only ever helps a small subset of the population (trivia for you: import tarriffs have the same net effect as export tarriffs, but nobody practices the latter because it never helps a domestic special interest group), and extensive protectionism is in fact practiced by many basket case countries. Cameroon, for example, has average import tarriffs of 61% (source: "The Undercover Economist").
Nah. Import tariffs protect the industry. While that is no doubt bad "in the long run" (but as Keynes remarked, in the long run we're all dead), there's not much long run to consider if your industry doesn't even take off to begin with.
Export tariffs would just be silly. Of course, if everybody applied them, you would be correct. But that's not how it works. A country wisely applies import tariffs on the kinds of goods that it wants to produce itself, but cannot yet compete with on the global market. It's only good as a temporary measure though (temporary as in decades, but still).
