Bad Samaritans

The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

by Ha-Joon Chang

Bloomsbury Press, 2008, paperback

Bad Samaritans

People in rich countries who preach free market and free trade to poor countries in order to capture larger shares of poor countries' markets and to preempt the emergence of possible competitors.

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In 1961, eight years after the end of its fratricidal war with North Korea, South Korea's yearly income stood at $82 per person. The average Korean earned less than half the average Ghanaian citizen ($179).)The Korean War ... was one of the bloodiest in human history, claiming four million lives in just over three years (1950-3). Half of South Korea's manufacturing base and more than 75% of its railways were destroyed in the conflict... A 1950s internal report from USAID - the main US government aid agency then, as now - called Korea a 'bottomless pit. At the time, the country's main exports were tungsten, fish and other primary commodities.

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Samsung, now one of the world's leading exporters of mobile phones, semiconductors and computers, the company started out as an exporter of fish, vegetables and fruit in 1938, seven years before Korea's independence from Japanese colonial rule. Until the 1970s, its, main lines of business were sugar refining and textiles that it had set up in the mid-1950s.

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The dictates of the free market: sound money (low inflation), small government, private enterprise, free trade and friendliness towards foreign investment.

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The neo-liberal agenda has been pushed by an alliance of rich country governments led by the ç US and mediated by the 'Unholy Trinity' of international economic organizations that they largely control - the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The rich governments use their aid budgets and access to their home markets as carrots to induce the developing countries to adopt neo-liberal policies. This is sometimes to benefit specific firms that lobby, but usually to create an environment in the developing country concerned that is friendly to foreign goods and investment in general. The IMF and the World Bank play their part by attaching to their loans the condition that the recipient countries adopt neoliberal policies. The WTO contributes by making trading rules that favour free trade in areas where the rich countries are stronger but not where they are weak (e.g., agriculture or textiles). These governments and international organizations are supported by an army of ideologues. Some of these people are highly trained academics who should know the limits of their free-market economics but tend to ignore them when it comes to giving policy advice (as happened especially when they advised the former communist economies in the 1990s. Together, these various bodies and individuals form a powerful propaganda machine, a financial-intellectual complex backed by money and power.

This neo-liberal establishment would have us believe that, during its miracle years between the 1960s and the 1980s, [South] Korea pursued a neo-liberal economic development strategy. The reality, however, was very different indeed. What Korea actually did during these decades was to nurture certain new industries, selected by the government in consultation with the private sector, through tariff protection, subsidies and other forms of government support (e.g., overseas marketing information services provided by the state export agency) until they 'grew up' enough to withstand international competition. The government owned all the banks, so it could direct the life blood of business - credit. Some big projects were undertaken directly by q state-owned enterprises - the steel maker, POSCO, being the best example - although the country had a pragmatic, rather than ideological, attitude to the issue of state ownership. If private enterprises worked well, that was fine; if they did not invest in important areas, the government had no qualms about setting up state-owned enterprises (SOEs); and if some private enterprises were mismanaged, the government often took them over, restructured them, and usually sold them off again.

The Korean government also had absolute control over scarce foreign exchange (violation of foreign exchange controls could be punished with the death penalty). When combined with a carefully designed list of priorities in the use of foreign exchange, it ensured that hard-earned foreign currencies were used for importing vital machinery and industrial inputs. The Korean government heavily controlled foreign investment as well, welcoming it with open arms in certain sectors while shutting it out completely in others, according to the evolving, national development plan. It also had a lax attitude towards foreign patents, encouraging 'reverse engineering' and overlooking 'pirating' of patented products.

The popular impression of Korea as a free-trade economy was created by its export success. But export success does not require free trade, as Japan and China have also shown. Korean exports in the earlier period - things like simple garments and cheap electronics - were all means to earn the hard currencies needed to pay for the advanced technologies and expensive machines that were necessary for the new, more difficult industries, which were protected through tariffs and subsidies. At the same time, tariff protection and subsidies were not there to shield industries from international competition forever, but to give them the time to absorb new technologies and establish new organizational capabilities until they could compete in the world market.

The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction. The Korean government did not vanquish the market as the communist states did. However, it did not have blind faith in the free market either. While it took markets seriously, the Korean strategy recognized that they often need to be corrected through policy intervention.

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Practically all of today's developed countries, including Britain and the US, the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against the orthodoxy of neo-liberal economics.

Today's rich countries used protection and subsidies, while discriminating against foreign investors - all anathema to today's economic orthodoxy and now severely restricted by multilateral treaties, like the WTO Agreements, and proscribed by aid donors and international financial organizations (notably the IMF and the World Bank).

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German economist Friedrick List in 1841

[I}t is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him.

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Today, there are certainly some people in the rich countries [Bad Samaritans] who preach free market and-free trade to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's markets and to preempt the emergence of possible competitors.

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History is written by the victors and it is human nature to re-interpret the past from the point of view of the present. As a result, the rich countries have, over time, gradually, if often sub-consciously, re-written their own histories to make them more consistent with how they see themselves today, rather than as they really were.

Many Bad Samaritans are recommending free-trade, free market policies in the poor countries in the honest but mistaken belief that those are the routes their own countries took the past to become rich. But they are in fact making the lives of those whom they are trying to help more difficult.

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Thomas Friedman, 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree'

Half the world seemed to be ... intent on building a better Lexus, dedicated to modernizing, streamlining, and privatizing their economies in order to thrive in the system of globalization. And half of the world - sometimes half the same country, sometimes half the same person - was still caught in the fight over who owns which olive tree.

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According to [Thomas] Friedman ['The Lexus and the Olive Tree'], unless they fit themselves into a particular set of economic policies that he calls the Golden Straitjacket, countries in the olive-tree world will not be able to join the Lexus world. In describing the Golden Straitjacket, he pretty much sums up today's neo-liberal economic orthodoxy: in order to fit into it, a country needs to privatize state-owned enterprises, maintain low inflation, reduce the size of government bureaucracy, balance the budget (if not running a surplus), liberalize trade, deregulate foreign investment, deregulate capital markets, make their currency convertible, reduce corruption and privatize pensions. According to him, this is the only path to success in the new global economy. His Straitjacket is the only gear suitable for the harsh but exhilarating game of globalization. Friedman is categorical: 'Unfortunately, this Golden Straitjacket is pretty much "one-size fits all" . . . It is not always pretty or gentle or comfortable. But it's here and it's the only model on the rack this historical season.'

However, the fact is that, had the Japanese government followed the free-trade economists back in the early 1960s, there would have been no Lexus. Toyota today would, at best, be a junior partner to some western car manufacturer, or worse, have been wiped out. The same would have been true for the entire Japanese economy. Had the country donned Friedman's Golden Straitjacket early on, Japan would have remained the third-rate industrial power that it was in the 1960s, with its income level on a par with Chile, Argentina and South Africa - it was then a country whose prime minister was insultingly dismissed as 'a transistor-radio salesman' by the French president, Charles De Gaulle. In other words, had they followed Friedman's advice, the Japanese would now not be exporting the Lexus but still be fighting over who owns which mulberry tree.

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Hong Kong became a British colony after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the result of the Opium War... The growing British taste for tea had created a huge trade deficit with China. In a desperate attempt to plug the gap, Britain started exporting opium produced in India to China. The mere detail that selling opium was illegal in China could not possibly be allowed to obstruct the noble cause of balancing the books. When a Chinese official seized an illicit cargo of opium in 1841, the British government used it as an excuse to fix the problem once and for all by declaring war. China was heavily defeated in the war and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking, which made China 'lease' Hong Kong to Britain and give up its right to set its own tariffs.

So there it was - the self-proclaimed leader of the 'liberal' world declaring war on another country because the latter was getting in the way of its illegal trade in narcotics.

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The countries under colonial rule and unequal treaties did very poorly. Between 1870 and 1913, per capita income in Asia (excluding Japan) grew at 0.4% per year, while that in Africa grew at 0.6% per year." The corresponding figures were 1.3% for Western Europe and 1.8% per year for the USA." It is particularly interesting to note that the Latin American countries, which by that time had regained tariff autonomy and were boasting some of the highest tariffs in the world, grew as fast as the US did during this period.

While they were imposing free trade on weaker nations through colonialism and unequal treaties, rich countries maintained rather high tariffs, especially industrial tariffs, for themselves.

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The history of the first globalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been rewritten today in order to fit the current neo-liberal orthodoxy. The history of protectionism in today's rich countries is vastly underplayed, while the imperialist origin of the high degree of global integration on the part of today's developing countries is hardly ever mentioned.

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During the 1960s and the 1970s, when they were pursuing the 'wrong' policies of protectionism and state intervention, per capita income in the developing countries grew by 3.0% annually... Since the 1980S, after they implemented neo-liberal policies, they grew at only about half the speed seen in the 1960s and the 1970s (1.7%).

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Growth failure has been particularly noticeable in Latin America and Africa, where neo-liberal programmes were implemented more' thoroughly than in Asia. In the 1960s and the 1970s, per capita income in Latin America was growing at 3.1% per year, slightly faster than the developing country average... Since the 1980s, however, when the continent embraced neo-liberalism, Latin America has been growing at less than one-third of the rate of the 'bad old days' [1960s-1970s].

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As for Africa, its per capita income grew relatively slowly even in the 1960s and the 1970s (1-2% a year). But since the 1980s, the region has seen a fall in living standards. This record is a damning indictment of the neoliberal orthodoxy, because most of the African economies have been practically run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter of a century.

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As a result of neo-liberal policies, income inequality has increased in most countries ... but growth has actually slowed down significantly.

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Neo-liberal globalization has failed to deliver on all fronts of economic life - growth, equality and stability. Despite his, we are constantly told how neo-liberal globalization has brought unprecedented benefits.

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Chile's early experiment with neo-liberalism, led by the so-called Chicago Boys (a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago, one of the centres of neo-liberal economics), was a disaster. It ended in a terrible financial crash in 1982, which had to be resolved by the nationalization of the whole banking sector. Thanks to this crash, the country recovered the pre-Pinochet level of income only in the late 1980s.

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The truth of post-1945 globalization is almost the polar opposite of the official history. During the period of controlled globalization underpinned by nationalistic policies between the 1950s and the 1970s, the world economy, especially in the developing world, was growing faster, was more stable and had more equitable income distribution than in the past two and a half decades of rapid and uncontrolled neo-liberal globalization. Nevertheless, this period is portrayed in the official history as a one of unmitigated disaster of nationalistic policies, especially in developing countries. This distortion of the historical record is peddled in order to mask the failure of neo-liberal policies.

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Much of what happens in the global economy is determined by the rich countries, without even trying. They account for 80% of world output, conduct 70% of international trade and make 70-90% (depending on the year) of all foreign direct investments .

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The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO (World Trade Organisation) ... are largely controlled by the rich countries ... so they devise and implement Bad Samaritan policies that those countries want.

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The IMF and the World Bank were originally set up in 1944 at a conference between the Allied forces (essentially the US and Britain), which worked out the shape of postwar international economic governance. This conference was held in the New Hampshire resort of Bretton Woods, so these agencies are sometimes collectively called the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs). The IMF was set up to lend money to countries in balance of payments crises so that they can reduce their balance of payments deficits without having to resort to deflation. The World Bank was set up to help the reconstruction of war-torn countries in Europe and the economic development of the post-colonial societies that were about to emerge - which is why it is officially called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. This was supposed to be done by financing projects in infrastructure development (e.g., roads, bridges, dams).

Following the Third World debt crisis of 1982, the roles of both the IMF and the World Bank changed dramatically. They started to exert a much stronger policy influence on developing countries through their joint operation of so-called structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). These programmes covered a much wider range of policies than what the Bretton Woods Institutions had originally been mandated to do. The BWIs now got deeply involved in virtually all areas of economic policy in the developing world. They branched out into areas like government budgets, industrial regulation, agricultural pricing, labour market regulation, privatization and so on. In the 1990s, there was a further advance in this 'mission creep' as they started attaching so-called governance conditionalities to their loans. These involved intervention in hitherto unthinkable areas, like democracy, government decentralization, central bank independence and corporate governance.

This mission creep raises a serious issue. The World Bank and the IMF initially started with rather limited mandates. Subsequently, they argued that they have to intervene in new areas outside their original mandates, as they, too, affect economic performance, a failure in which has driven countries to borrow money from them. However, on this reasoning, there is no area of our life in which the BWIs cannot intervene. Everything that goes on in a country has implications for its economic performance. By this logic, the IMF and the World Bank should be able to impose conditionalities on everything from fertility decisions, ethnic integration and gender equality, to cultural values.

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The Bad Samaritan rich nations often demand, as a condition for their financial contribution to IMF packages, that the borrowing country be made to adopt policies that have little to do with fixing its economy but that serve the interests of the rich countries lending the money.

Their [World Bank and IMF] governance structure severely biases them towards the interests of the rich countries. Their decisions are made basically according to the share capital that a country has n other words, they have a one-dollar-one-vote system. This means that the rich countries, which collectively control 60% of the voting shares, have an absolute control over their policies, while the US has a de facto veto in relation to decisions in the 18 most important areas.

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The World Bank's engagement with NGOs (non-governmental organizations)... the impacts of such consultation are at best marginal. Moreover, when increasing numbers of NGOs in developing countries are indirectly funded by the World Bank, the value of such an exercise is becoming more doubtful.

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The World Trade Organisation is an international organization in whose running the developing countries have the greatest say. Unlike the IMF or the World Bank, it is 'democratic' in the sense of allowing one country one vote (of course, we can debate whether giving China, with 1.3 billion people, and Luxembourg, with fewer than half a million people, one vote each is really 'democratic'). And, unlike in the UN, where the five permanent members of the Security Council have veto power, no country has a veto in the WTO. Since they have the numerical advantage, the developing countries count far more in the WTO than they do in the IMF or the World Bank.

Unfortunately, in practice, votes are never taken, and the organization is essentially run by an oligarchy comprising a small number of rich countries.

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It is a law of competition that people who can do difficult things which others cannot will earn more profit.

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Britain remained a highly protectionist country until the mid-19th century. In 1820, Britain's average tariff rate on manufacturing imports was 45-55%, compared to 6-8% in the Low Countries, 8-12% in Germany and Switzerland and around 20% in France.

Tariffs were however, not the only weapon in the arsenal of British trade policy. When it came to its colonies, Britain was quite happy to impose an outright ban on advanced manufacturing activities that it did not want developed. [Prime Minister Robert] Walpole banned the construction of new and slitting steel mills in America, forcing the Americans to specialize in low value-added pig and bar iron, rather than high value-added steel products.

Britain also banned exports from its colonies that competed with its own products, home and abroad. 3 banned cotton textile imports from India ('calicoes'), which were then superior to the British ones. In 1699 it banned the export of woollen cloth from its colonies to other countries (the Wool Act), destroying the Irish woolen industry and stifling the emergence of woollen manufacture in America.

Finally, policies were deployed to encourage primary commodity production in the colonies. Walpole provided export subsidies to (on the American side) and abolished import taxes on (on the British side) raw materials produced in the American colonies such as hemp, wood and timber. He wanted to make absolutely sure that the colonists stuck to producing primary commodities and never emerged as competitors to British manufacturers. Thus they were compelled to leave the most profitable 'high-tech' industries in the hands of Britain - which ensured that Britain would enjoy the benefits of being on the cutting edge of world development.

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Once British industries had become internationally competitive, protection became less necessary and even counter-productive. Protecting industries that do not need protection any more is likely to make them complacent and inefficient(as Smith observed.) Therefore, adopting free trade was now increasingly in Britain's interest.

... By the end of the Napeolenic Wars in 1815 ... British manufacturers were firmly established as the most efficient in the world, except in a few limited areas where countries like Belgium and Switzerland possessed technological leads. British manufacturers correctly perceived that free trade was now in their interest and started campaigning for it...

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[David] Ricardo's theory ... says that, accepting their current levels of technology as given, it is better for countries to specialize in things that they are relatively better at.

His theory fails when a country wants to acquire more advanced technologies so that it can do more difficult things that few others can do - that is, when it wants to develop its economy. It takes time and experience to absorb new technologies, so technologically backward producers need a period of protection from international competition during this period of learning. Such protection is costly, because the country is giving up the chance to import better and cheaper products. However, it is a price that has to be paid if it wants to develop advanced industries. Ricardo's theory is, thus seen, for those who accept the status quo but not for those who want to change it.

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Britain adopted free trade only when it had acquired a technological lead over its competitors 'behind high and long-lasting tariff barriers'.

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Under British rule, America was given the full British colonial treatment. It was naturally denied the use of tariffs to protect its new industries. It was prohibited from exporting products that competed with British products. It was given subsidies to produce raw materials.

Moreover, outright restrictions were imposed on what Americans could manufacture.

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Once elected, [Abraham] Lincoln raised industrial tariffs to their highest level so far in US history. The expenditure for the Civil War was given as an excuse - in the same way in which the first significant rise in US tariffs came about during the Anglo-American War (1812-16). However, after the war, tariffs stayed at wartime levels or above. Tariffs on manufactured imports remained at 40-50% until the First World War, and were the highest of any country in the world.

... Despite being the most protectionist country in the world throughout the 19th century and right up to the 1920s, the US was also the fastest growing economy.

... After the Second World War that the US - with its industrial supremacy now unchallenged - liberalized its trade and started championing the cause of free trade.

... Even when it shifted to freer (if not absolutely free) trade, the US government promoted key industries ... namely, public funding of R&D. Between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, US federal government funding accounted for 50-70% of the country's total R&D funding, which is far above the figure of around 20%, found in such 'government-led' countries as Japan and Korea. Without federal government funding for R&D, the US would not have been able to maintain its technological lead over the rest of the world in key industries like computers, semiconductors, life sciences, the internet and aerospace.

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The two champions of free trade, Britain and the US, were not only not free trade economies, but had been the two most protectionist economies among rich countries - that is, until they each in succession became the world's dominant industrial power.

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Practically all of today's rich countries used nationalistic policies (e.g., tariffs, subsidies, restrictions on foreign trade) to promote their infant industries.

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Free trade economists have to explain how free trade can be an explanation for the economic success of today's rich countries, when it simply had not been practised very much before they became rich.

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Roman Politician and philosopher Cicero

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge?

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[There is a] gradual and subtle process in which history is re-written to fit a country's present self-image. As a result, many rich country people recommend free-trade, free-market policies in the honest belief that these are policies that their own ancestors used in order to make their countries rich. When the poor countries protest that those policies hurt, those protests are dismissed as being intellectually misguided or as serving the interests of their corrupt leaders. It never occurs to those Bad Samaritans that the policies they recommend are fundamentally at odds with what history teaches us to be the best development policies.

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Industries in developing countries will not survive if they are exposed to international competition too early. They need time to improve their capabilities by mastering advanced technologies and building effective organizations. This is the essence of the infant industry argument, first theorized by Alexander Hamilton, first treasury secretary of the US, and used by generations of policy-makers before and after him.

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Belief in the virtue of free trade is so central to the neo-liberal orthodoxy that it is effectively what defines a neo-liberal economist. You may question (if not totally reject) any other element of the neo-liberal agenda - open capital markets, strong patents or even privatisation - and still stay in the neo-liberal church. However, once you object to free trade, you are effectively inviting ex-communication.

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During the past quarter of a century, most developing countries have liberalized trade to a huge degree. They were first pushed by the IMF and the World Bank in the aftermath of the Third World debt crisis of 1982. There was a further decisive impetus towards trade liberalization following the launch of the WTO in 1995. During the last decade or so, bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) have also proliferated. Unfortunately, during this period, developing countries have not done well at all, despite ... massive trade liberalization.

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The story of Mexico - poster boy of the free-trade camp - is particularly telling. If any developing country can succeed with free trade, it should be Mexico. It borders on the largest market in the world (the US) and has had a free trade agreement with it since 1995 (the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA). It also has a large diaspora living in the US, which can provide important informal business links. Unlike many other poorer developing countries, it has a decent pool of skilled workers, competent managers and relatively developed physical infrastructure (roads, ports and so on).

Free trade economists argue that free trade benefited Mexico by accelerating growth. Indeed, following NAFTA, between 1994 and 2002, Mexico's per capita GDP grew at 1.8% per year, a big improvement over the 0.1% rate recorded between 1985 and 1995. But the decade before NAFTA was also a decade of extensive trade liberalisation for Mexico, following its conversion to neo-liberalism in the mid-1980s. So trade liberalization was also responsible for the 0.1% growth rate. Wide-ranging trade liberalization in the 1980s and the 1990s wiped out whole swathes of Mexican industry that had been painstakingly built up during the period of import substitution industrialization (ISI). The result was, predictably, a slowdown in economic growth, lost jobs and falls in wages (as better-paying manufacturing jobs disappeared). Its agricultural sector was also hard hit by subsidized US products, especially corn, the staple diet of most Mexicans. On top of that, NAFTA's positive impact (in terms of increasing exports to the US market) has run out of steam in the last few years. During 2001-2005, Mexico's growth performance has been miserable, with an annual growth rate of per capita income at 0.3% (or a paltry 1.7% increase in total over five years). By contrast, during the 'bad old days' of ISI (1955-82), Mexico's per capita income had grown much faster than during the NAFTA period - at an average of 3.1% per year. Mexico is a particularly striking example of the failure of premature wholesale trade liberalization.

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Trade liberalization ... has increased the pressures on government budgets, as it reduced tariff revenues. This has been a particularly serious problem for the poorer countries. Because they lack tax collection capabilities and because tariffs are the easiest tax to collect, they rely heavily on tariffs (which sometimes account for over 50% of total government revenue). As a result, the fiscal adjustment that has had to be made following large-scale trade liberalization has been huge in many developing countries - even a recent IMF study shows that, in low-income countries that have limited abilities to collect other taxes, less than 30% of the revenue lost due to trade liberalization over the last 25 years has been made up by other taxes. Moreover, lower levels of business activity and higher unemployment resulting from trade liberalization have also reduced income tax revenue. When countries were already under considerable pressure from the IMF to reduce their budget deficits, falling revenue meant severe cuts in spending, often eating into vital areas like education, health and physical infrastructure, damaging long-term growth.

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What has happened during the past quarter of a century has been a rapid, unplanned and blanket trade liberalization. Just to remind the reader, during the 'bad old days' of protectionist import substitution industrialization (ISI), developing countries used to grow, on average, at double the rate that they are doing today under free trade. Free trade simply isn't working for developing countries.

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In developed countries, the welfare state works as a mechanism to partially compensate the losers from the trade adjustment process through unemployment benefits, guarantees of health care and education, and even guarantees of a minimum income. In some countries, such as Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, there are also highly effective retraining schemes for unemployed workers so that they can be equipped with new skills. In most developing countries, however, the welfare state is very weak and sometimes virtually non-existent. As a result, the victims of trade adjustment in these countries do not get even partially compensated for the sacrifice that they have made for the rest of society.

As a result, the gains from trade liberalization in poor countries are likely to be more unevenly distributed than in rich countries. Especially when considering that many people in developing countries are already very poor and close to the subsistence level, largescale trade liberalization carried out in a short period of time will mean that some people have their livelihoods wrecked. In developed countries, unemployment due to trade adjustment may not be a matter of life and death, but in developing countries it often is.

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In the long run, free trade is a policy that is likely to condemn developing countries to specialize in sectors that offer low productivity growth and thus low growth in living standards. This is why so few countries have succeeded with free trade, while most successful countries have used infant industry protection to one degree or another. Low income that results from lack of economic development severely restricts the freedom that the poor countries have in deciding their future. Paradoxically, therefore, 'free' trade policy reduces the 'freedom' of the developing countries that practise it.

... Never mind that free trade works neither in practice nor in theory. Despite its abysmal record, the Bad Samaritan rich countries have strongly promoted trade liberalization in developing since the 1980s.

... In the 1980s ... the US, whose enlightened approach to international trade with economically lesser nations rapidly gave way to a system similar to 19th-century British 'free trade imperialism This new direction was clearly expressed by the then US president Ronald Reagan in 1986, as the Uruguay Round of GATT talks was starting, when he called for new and more liberal agreements with our trading ;partners - agreement under which they would fully open their markets and treat American products as they treat their own. Such agreement was realized through the Uruguay Round of GATT trade talks, which started in the Uruguayan city of Punta del Este in 1986 and was concluded in the Moroccan city of Marrakech in 1994. The result was the World Trade Organisation regime - a new international trade regime that was much more biased against the developing countries than the GATT regime.

On the surface, the WTO simply created a 'level playing field' among its member countries, requiring that everyone plays by the same rule ... Critical to the process was the adoption of the principle of a 'single undertaking', which meant that all members had to sign up to all agreements. In the GATT regime, countries could pick and choose the agreements that they signed up to and many developing countries could stay out of agreements that they did not want - for example, the agreement restricting the use of subsidies. With the single undertaking, all members had to abide by the same rules. All of them had to reduce their tariffs. They were made to give up import quotas, export subsidies (allowed only for the poorest countries) and most domestic subsidies. But, when we look at the detail, we realize that the field is not level at all.

To begin with, even though the rich countries have low average protection, they tend to disproportionately protect products that poor countries export, especially garments and textiles. This means that, when exporting to a rich country market, poor countries face higher, tariffs than other rich countries. An Oxfam report points out that 'The overall import tax rate for the USA is 1.6 per cent. That rate rises steeply for a large number of developing countries: average import taxes range from around four per cent for India and Peru, to seven per cent for Nicaragua, and as much as 14-15 per cent for Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal." As a result, in 2002, India paid more tariffs to the US government than Britain did, despite the fact that the size of its economy was less than one-third that of the UK. Even more strikingly, in the same year, Bangladesh paid almost as much in tariffs to the US government as France, despite the fact that the size of its economy was only 3% that of France.

... The Uruguay Round resulted in all countries, except for the poorest ones, reducing tariffs quite a lot in proportional terms. But the developing countries ended up reducing their tariffs a lot more in absolute terms, for the simple reason that they started with higher tariffs. For example, before the WTO agreement, India had an average tariffs.

... In addition, there were areas where 'levelling the playing field' meant a one-sided benefit to rich countries. The most important example is the TRIPS (Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights) agreement, which strengthened the protection of patents and other intellectual property rights. Unlike trade in goods and services, where everyone has something to sell, this is an area where developed countries are almost always sellers and developing countries buyers. Therefore, increasing the protection for intellectual property rights means that the cost is mainly borne by the developing nations.

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In the name of 'levelling the playing field', the Bad Samaritan rich nations have created a new international trading system that is rigged in their favour. They are preventing the poorer countries from using the tools of trade and industrial policies that they had themselves so effectively used in the past in order to promote their own economic development - not just tariffs and subsidies, but also regulation of foreign investment and 'violation' of foreign intellectual property rights.

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It may be valuable for some developing countries to get access to agricultural markets in developed economies.* But it is far more important that we allow developing countries to use protection, subsidies and regulation of foreign investment adequately in order to develop their own economies, rather than giving them bigger agricultural markets overseas. Especially if agricultural liberalization by the rich countries can only be 'bought' by the developing countries giving up their use of the tools of infant industry promotion, the price is not worth paying. Developing countries should not be forced to sell their future for small immediate gains.

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South Korea is one of the world's industrial powerhouses, while North Korea languishes in poverty. Much of this is thanks to the fact that South Korea aggressively traded with the outside world and actively absorbed foreign technologies while North Korea pursued its doctrine of self-sufficiency. Through trade, South Korea learned about the existence of better technologies and earned the foreign currency that it needed in order to buy them.

... North Korea is technologically stuck in the past, with 1940s Japanese and 1950s Soviet technologies, while South Korea is one of the most technologically dynamic economies in the world

... In the end, economic development is about acquiring and mastering advanced technologies. In theory, a country can develop such technologies on. its own, but such a strategy of technological self-sufficiency quickly hits the wall, as seen in the North Korean case. This is why all successful cases of economic development have involved serious attempts to get hold of and master advanced foreign technologies.

p82
As South Korea shows, active participation in international trade does not require free trade. Indeed, had South Korea pursued free trade and not promoted infant industries, it would not have become a major trading nation. It would still be exporting raw materials (e.g., tungsten ore, fish, seaweed) or low-technology, low-price products (e.g., textiles, garments, wigs made with human hair) that used to be its main export items in the 1960s. The secret of its success lay in a judicious mix of protection and open trade, with the areas of protection constantly changing as new infant industries were developed and old infant industries became internationally competitive a way, this is not much of a 'secret As I have shown in the earlier chapters) this is how almost all of today's rich countries became rich and this is at the root of almost all recent success stories in the developing world. Protection does not guarantee development, but development without it is very difficult.

p83
Free trade is not the best path to economic development. Trade helps economic development only when the country employs a mixture of protection and open trade, constantly adjusting it according to its changing needs and capabilities. Trade is simply too important for economic development to be left to free trade economists.

p86
When economic prospects in a developing country are considered good, too much foreign financial capital may enter. This can temporarily raise asset prices (e.g., prices of stocks, real estate prices) beyond their real value, creating asset bubbles. When things get bad, often because of the bursting of the very same asset bubble, foreign capital tends to leave all at the same time, making the economic downturn even worse. Such 'herd behaviour' was most vividly demonstrated in the 1997 Asian crises, when foreign capital flowed out on a massive scale, despite the good long-term prospects of the economies concerned (Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia).

... the impact of herd behaviour by foreign investors is much greater for the simple reason that developing country financial markets are tiny relative to the amounts of money sloshing around the international financial system.

... Developing countries have experienced more frequent financial crises since many of them opened their capital markets at the urge of the Bad Samaritans in the 1980s and the 1990s.

p92
In 1832, Andrew Jackson ... refused to renew the licence for the quasi-central bank, the second Bank of the USA - the successor to Hamilton's Bank of the USA. This was done on the grounds that the foreign ownership share of the bank was too high -30%... Declaring his decision, Jackson said: 'should the stock of the bank principally pass into the hands of the subjects of a foreign country, and we should unfortunately become involved in a war with that country, what would be our condition? ... Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence, it would be far more formidable and dangerous than the naval and military power of the enemy. If we must have a bank ... it should be purely American? If the president of a developing country said something like this today, he would be branded a xenophobic dinosaur and blackballed in the international community.

p158
Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

When the rich countries get into recession, they usually relax monetary policy and increase budget deficits. When the same thing happens in developing countries, the Bad Samaritans, through the IMF, force them to raise interest rates to absurd levels and balance their budgets, or even generate budget surplus - even if these actions treble unemployment and spark riots in the streets.

p160
In 1961, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was a desperately poor country with a per capita annual income of $67. Mobutu Sese Seko came to power in a military coup in 1965 and ruled until 1997. He is estimated to have stolen at least $15 billion during his 32-year rule.

p160
In that same year, with a per capita annual income of only $49, Indonesia was even poorer than Zaire. Mohamed Suharto came to power in a military coup in 1966 and ruled until 1998. He is estimated to have stolen at least $15 billion during his 32-year rule. Some suggest the figure may even have been as high as $35 billion.

p172
Unlike what neo-liberals say, market and democracy clash at a fundamental level. Democracy runs on the principle of one man (one person), one vote The market runs on the principle of one dollar, one vote. Naturally, the former gives equal weight to each person, regardless of the money she/he has. The latter gives greater weight to richer people. Therefore, democratic decisions usually subvert the logic of market.

p179
In the long run, economic development brings democracy. But this broad picture should not obscure the fact that some countries have sustained democracy even when they were fairly poor, while many others have not become democracies until they are very rich. Without people actually fighting for it, democracy does not automatically grow out of economic prosperity.

p211
Investment in capability-building requires short-term sacrifices. But that is not a reason not to do it, contrary to what free-trade economists say. In fact, we often see individuals making short-term sacrifices for a long-term increase in their capacities, and heartily approve of them. Suppose a low-skilled worker quits his lowpaying job and attends a training course to acquire new skills. If someone were to say the worker is making a big mistake because he is now not able to earn even the low wage he used to earn, most of us would criticize that person for being short-sighted; an increase in a person's future earning power justifies such short-term sacrifice. Likewise, countries need to make short-term sacrifices if they are to build up their long-term productive capabilities. If tariff barriers or subsidies allow domestic firms to accumulate new abilities - by buying better machinery, improving their organization and training their workers - and become internationally competitive in the process, the temporary reduction in the country's level of consumption (because it is refusing to buy higher-quality, lower-price foreign goods) may be totally justified.

This simple but powerful principle - sacrificing the present to improve the future - is why the Americans refused to practise free trade in the 19th century. It is why Finland did not want foreign investment until recently. It is why the Korean government set up steel mills in the late 1960s, despite the objections of the World Bank. It is why the Swiss did not issue patents and the Americans did not protect foreigners' copyrights until the late 19th century.

... It took the US 130 years to develop its economy enough to feel confident about doing away with tariffs. Without such long time horizons, Japan might still be mainly exporting silk, Britain wool and the US cotton.

Unfortunately, these are time frames that are not compatible with the neo-liberal policies recommended by the Bad Samaritans. Free trade demands that poor countries compete immediately with more advanced foreign producers, leading to the demise of firms before they can acquire new capabilities. A liberal foreign investment policy, which allows superior foreign firms into a developing country, will, in the long run, restrict the range of capabilities accumulated in local firms, whether independent or owned by foreign companies. Free capital markets, with their pro-cyclical herd behaviour, make longterm projects vulnerable. A high interest rate policy raises the 'price of future', so to speak, making long-term investment unviable. No wonder neo-liberalism makes economic development difficult - it takes the acquisition of new productive capabilities difficult.

p213
History has repeatedly shown that the single most important thin that distinguishes rich countries from poor ones is basically their higher capabilities in manufacturing, where productivity is generally higher, and, more importantly, where productivity, tends to grow faster than in agriculture or services.

217
Over the past quarter of a century, the Bad Samaritans have made it increasingly difficult for developing countries to pursue the 'right' policies for their development. They have used the Unholy Trinity of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, the regional multilateral financial institutions, their aid budgets and bilateral and regional free-trade or investment agreements in order to block them from doing so. They argue that nationalist policies (like trade protection and discrimination against foreign investors) should be banned, or severely curtailed, not only because they are supposed to be bad for the practising countries themselves but also because they lead to 'unfair' competition.

... Global economic competition is a game of unequal players. It pits against each other countries that range from, as we development economists like to say, Switzerland to Swaziland. Consequently, it is only fair that we 'tilt the playing field' in favour of the weaker countries. In practice, this means allowing them to protect and subsidize their producers more vigorously and to put stricter regulations on foreign investment.* These countries should also be allowed to protect intellectual property rights less stringently so that they can more actively 'borrow' ideas from more advanced countries. Rich countries can further help by transferring their technologies on favourable terms; this will have the added benefit of making economic growth in poor countries more compatible with the need to fight global warming, as rich country technologies tend to be far more energy efficient.

p221
John Maynard Keynes, when accused of inconsistency

"When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?"

p221
Many Bad Samaritans go along with wrong policies for the simple reason that it's easier to be a conformist. Why go around looking for 'inconvenient truths' when you can just accept what most politicians and newspapers say? Why bother to find out what is really going on in poor countries when you can easily blame it on corruption, laziness or the profligacy of their people? Why go out of your way to check up on your own country's history when the 'official' version suggests that it has always been the home of all virtues? - free trade, creativity, democracy, prudence, you name it.

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