| France | R | 12- 15 | 20 | 21 | 30 | 18 |
| Germany[5] | 8-12 | 4- 6 | 13 | 20 | 21 | 26 |
| Italy | n.a. | 8- 10 | 18 | 22 | 46 | 25 |
| Japan[6] | R | 5 | 30 | n.a. | n.a. | n.a. |
| Netherlands[4] | 6-8 | 3- 5 | 4 | 6 | n.a. | 11 |
| Russia | R | 15- 20 | 84 | R | R | R |
| Spain | R | 15- 20 | 41 | 41 | 63 | n.a. |
| Sweden | R | 3- 5 | 20 | 16 | 21 | 9 |
| Switzerland | 8-12 | 4- 6 | 9 | 14 | 19 | n.a. |
| United Kingdom | 45- 55 | 0 | 0 | 5 | n.a. | 23 |
| United States | 35-45 | 40- 50 | 44 | 37 | 48 | 14 |
Source: Bairoch 1993, p. 40, table 3.3.
R = Numerous and important restrictions on manufactured imports existed and therefore average tariff rates are not meaningful.
1. World Bank (1991, p. 97, Box table S.2) provides a similar table, partly drawing on Bairoch's own studies that form the basis of the above table. However, the World Bank figures, although in most cases very similar to Bairoch's figures, are unweighted averages, which are obviously less preferable to the weighted average ,figures that Bairoch provides.
2. These are very approximate rates, and give range of average rates, not extremes.
3. Austria-Hungary before 1925.
4. In 1820, Belgium was united with the Netherlands.
5. The 1820 figure is for Prussia only.
6. Before 1911, Japan was obliged to keep low tariff rates (up to 5%) through a series of 'unequal treaties' with the European countries and the USA. The World Bank table cited in note 1 above gives Japan's unweighted average tariff rate for all goods (not just manufactured goods) for the years 1925, 1930, 1950 as 13%, 19%, 4%.
Despite these limitations, as I have pointed out in Chapter 1 and will show in more detail in the rest of this chapter, virtually all NDCs actively used interventionist industrial, trade and technology (ITT) policies that are aimed at promoting infant industries during their catch-up periods.[10] As we shall see later, there were some apparent exceptions to this, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, but these were countries that were either at or very near the technological frontier and thus did not, by definition, need much infant industry promotion. Some countries used activist ITT policies even after the catch-up was successfully achieved (Britain in the early nineteenth century, the USA in the early twentieth century). Tariff protection was obviously a very important policy tool in the ITT policy package used by the NDCs, but, as we shall show later, it was by no means the only one used, or even necessarily the most important.
On the trade front, subsidies and duty drawbacks on inputs for exported goods were frequently used to promote exports. Governments both provided industrial subsidies and used various public investment programmes, especially in infrastructure but also in manufacturing. They supported foreign technology acquisition, sometimes by legal means such as financing study tours and apprenticeships, and sometimes through illegal measures, which included support for industrial espionage, smuggling of contraband machinery and refusal to acknowledge foreign patents. Development of domestic technological capabilities was encouraged through financial support for research and development, education and training. Measures were also taken to raise awareness of advanced technologies (for example, the establishment of model factories, organisation of exhibitions, granting of free imported machinery to private sector firms). In addition, some governments created institutional mechanisms that facilitated public- private cooperation (for example, public-private joint ventures and industry associations with close links with the government). It is important to note that many of these policies are greatly frowned upon these days, even when they have not been made explicitly illegal through bilateral and multilateral agreements.
When they reached the technological frontier, the NDCs used a range of policies in order to help themselves pull away from their existing and potential competitors. Britain, given the duration for which it held the position of ‘frontier economy’, is most visible in this respect, but other countries also used similar measures when they could. Britain used measures to control transfer of technology to its potential competitors (for example, controls on skilled worker migration or machinery export), and put pressure on the less developed countries to open up their markets, by force if necessary. However, the catch-up economies that were not formal or informal colonies did not simply sit down and accept these restrictive measures. They employed a wide variety of measures to overcome the obstacles created by these restrictions, even resorting to ‘illegal’ means, such as the poaching of workers and smuggling of machinery.[11]
2.2. The Catch-up Strategies
In this section, I examine the experiences of a range of NDCs – Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Korea and Taiwan – and consider what kinds of industrial, trade and technology (ITT) policies they used when they themselves were developing countries. I show that in most of these countries, the policies that were used are almost the opposite of what the present orthodoxy says they employed ‘and currently recommends that the currently developing countries should also use’.
2.2.1. Britain
As the intellectual fountain of the modern
Britain entered its post-feudal age (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) as a relatively backward economy. Before 1600, it was an importer of technology from the Continent. [12] It relied on exports of raw wool and, to a lesser extent, of low-value-added wool cloth (what was then known as ‘short cloth’) to the then more advanced Low Countries, especially the towns of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres in Flanders, now part of Belgium.[13] The British monarchs of this time taxed these products mainly for revenue reasons, but since cloth was taxed more lightly than raw wool, this
