industry of the time that had been dominated by the Low Countries (what are Belgium and the Netherlands today), with the help of tariff protection, subsidies, and other supports that Walpole and his successors provided to the domestic woollen manufacturers. The industry soon provided Britain’s main source of export earnings, which enabled the country to import the food and raw materials that it needed to launch the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Britain adopted free trade only in the 1860s, when its industrial dominance was absolute. In the same way in which the US was the most protectionist country in the world during most of its phase of ascendancy (from the 1830s to the 1940s), Britain was one of the world’s most protectionist countries during much of its own economic rise (from the 1720s to the 1850s).
Virtually all of today’s rich countries used protectionism and subsidies to promote their infant industries. Many of them (especially Japan, Finland and Korea) also severely restricted foreign investment. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, Finland used to classify all enterprises with more than 20 per cent foreign ownership officially as ‘dangerous enterprises’. Several of them (especially France, Austria, Finland, Singapore and Taiwan) used state- owned enterprises to promote key industries. Singapore, which is famous for its free-trade policies and welcoming attitudes towards foreign investors, produces over 20 per cent of its output through state-owned enterprises, when the international average is around 10 per cent. Nor did today’s rich countries protect foreigners’ intellectual property rights very well, if at all – in many of them it was legal to patent someone else’s invention as long as that someone else was a foreigner.
There were exceptions of course. The Netherlands, Switzerland (until the First World War) and Hong Kong used little protectionism, but even these countries did not follow today’s orthodox doctrines. Arguing that patents are artificial monopolies that go against the principle of free trade (a point which is strangely lost on most of today’s free-trade economists), the Netherlands and Switzerland refused to protect patents until the early twentieth century. Even though it did not do it on such principled grounds, Hong Kong was until recently even more notorious for its violation of intellectual property rights than the former countries. I bet you know someone – or at least have a friend who knows someone – who has bought pirated computer software, a fake Rolex watch or an ‘unofficial’ Calvin & Hobbes T-shirt from Hong Kong.
Most readers may find my historical account counter-intuitive. Having been repeatedly told that free-market policies are the best for economic development, they would find it mysterious how most of today’s countries could use all those supposedly bad policies – such as protectionism, subsidies, regulation and state ownership of industry – and still become rich.
The answer lies in the fact that those bad policies were in fact good policies, given the stage of economic development in which those countries were at the time, for a number of reasons. First is Hamilton’s infant industry argument, which I explain in greater detail in the chapter ‘My six-year-old son should get a job’ in my earlier book
Despite their own history, the rich countries make developing countries open their borders and expose their economies to the full forces of global competition, using the conditions attached to their bilateral foreign aid and to the loans from international financial institutions that they control (such as the IMF and the World Bank) as well as the ideological influence that they exercise through intellectual dominance. In promoting policies that they did not use when they were developing countries themselves, they are saying to the developing countries, ‘Do as I say, not as I did.’
When the historical hypocrisy of the rich countries is pointed out, some defenders of the free market come back and say: ‘Well, protectionism and other interventionist policies may have worked in nineteenth-century America or mid twentieth-century Japan, but haven’t the developing countries monumentally screwed up when they tried such policies in the 1960s and 70s?’ What may have worked in the past, they say, is not necessarily going to work today.
The truth is that developing countries did not do badly at all during the ‘bad old days’ of protectionism and state intervention in the 1960s and 70s. In fact, their economic growth performance during the period was far superior to that achieved since the 1980s under greater opening and deregulation.
Since the 1980s, in addition to rising inequality (which was to be expected from the pro-rich nature of the reforms –
Growth performances in regions that have faithfully followed the neo-liberal recipe – Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa – have been much inferior to what they had in the ‘bad old days’. In the 1960s and 70s, Latin America grew at 3.1 per cent in per capita terms. Between 1980 and 2009, it grew at a rate just above one-third that – 1.1 per cent. And even that rate was partly due to the rapid growth of countries in the region that had explicitly rejected neo-liberal policies sometime earlier in the 2000s – Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela. Sub-Saharan Africa grew at 1.6 per cent in per capita terms during the ‘bad old days’, but its growth rate was only 0.2 per cent between 1980 and 2009 (
To sum up, the free-trade, free-market policies are policies that have rarely, if ever, worked. Most of the rich countries did not use such policies when they were developing countries themselves, while these policies have slowed down growth and increased income inequality in the developing countries in the last three decades. Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies and few ever will.
Thing 8
Capital has a nationality
The real hero of globalization has been the transnational corporation. Transnational corporations, as their name implies, are corporations that have gone beyond their original national boundaries. They may be still headquartered in the country where they were founded, but much of their production and research facilities are outside their home country, employing people, including many top decision-makers, from across the world. In this age of such nation-less capital, nationalistic policies towards foreign capital are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. If a country’s government discriminates against them, transnational corporations will not invest in that country. The intention may be to help the national economy by promoting national firms, but such policies actually harm it by preventing the most efficient firms from establishing themselves in the country.
Despite the increasing ‘transnationalization’ of capital, most trans-national companies in fact remain national companies with international operations, rather than genuinely nation-less companies. They conduct the bulk of their core activities, such as high-end research and strategizing, at home. Most of their top decision-makers are home-country nationals. When they have to shut down factories or cut jobs, they usually do it last at home for various political and, more importantly, economic reasons. This means that the home country appropriates the bulk of the benefits from a transnational corporation. Of course, their nationality is not the only thing that determines how corporations behave, but we ignore the nationality of capital at our peril.
Carlos Ghosn was born in 1954 to Lebanese parents in the Brazilian city of Porto Velho. At the age of six,
