G'day Jim, > I don't think S. Korea, Taiwan, or Japan made it as far as they did > based on > import substitution, which at least in Latin America meant a > nation-centric > effort at development. It's more accurate to say that they used > protection > in order to build up the basis for fighting and (at least temporarily) > > winning the battle of exporting. (Nation-centric development involves, > for > example, high domestic wages to provide a home market. This is much > less > important to the East Asian "model.")
As I understand it, this matches the quasi-Stiglitzian Wolfensonian World Bank view, no? They're not sure there's anything necessarily wrongwith a nation-building / sunrise sector public support / intervention model - but they still encourage a globalising stance. So it'd be export-producing enterprises you'd be looking at nurturing, rather than indulging in across-the-board import-substitution. That's a big recant on the part of the WB, but still poses the common problem of people sweating over, and often using up arable land on, stuff that's not for their consumption, even though they're desperately short of the stuff they could be manufacturing or growing with all that labour, capital and land. The long-term gain is (a) only theoretically there [they're often stuck in the role of pricetaker rather than maker, for a start] and (b) very long-term indeed to someone who's malnourished or sans roof/clothing/medecine. Some of them are dead well before the long run ... > but for better or for worse the genie is out of the bottle and it's > hard to reverse the neoliberal move away from import substitution. Yeah, but one senses, too, that the WB retreat into mixed paradigms and confessions that the empirical hasn't too convincingly validated the theoretical - well, that indicates the backlash genie might be out of its bottle, too. Doncha reckon? Cheers, Rob.
