On 9/18/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
most of the stories I've read about import-substituting industrialization indicate a bias toward serving the demand of the rich. The exception would be a country with a large internal market (such as the US after 1860). The US is a (the?) major success story for ISI.
Had the slave owners of the South won the Civil War, the US could have been like Argentina if not Southern Africa: <blockquote>Land Inequality and the Transition to Modern Growth¤ Tasso Adamopoulosy York University This Draft: January 2006 Abstract Can the initial distribution of land, in a country's early history, affect its subsequent economic development? In this paper, I show that when land ownership is sufficiently concentrated, the landed elite will lobby the government to raise barriers to industrialization in order to protect its rents in the rural economy. Barriers, which take the form of sectoral policies that disadvantage the development of industry in favor of agriculture, can affect both the timing and the pace of industrialization. I show quantitatively that this theory matches well with the divergent development experiences of Canada and Argentina. Even though these two countries had the same level of income per capita in 1850 and shared many other initial conditions, Canada took-off while Argentina experienced a deterioration of its position in the world income distribution. I provide evidence that, Argentina had a markedly higher inequality in land ownership than Canada. I show, in the context of my model, that the observed differences in land distributions in the 19th century, through their effects on equilibrium policies, can produce equilibrium output paths that resemble those of Canada and Argentina. <http://dept.econ.yorku.ca/~tasso/land_web.pdf></blockquote> The state, be it a capitalist state like Japan or a socialist state like the USSR, has to break the power of big landowners to make import-substitution industrialization successful. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
