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A South Korean author has researched the question.
Again... the question is: Has free trade ever ever worked? The answer, No.
Henry
Paulson - try to name a country that has developed under a free trade
model, without protectionism. You can't, can you.
NY Times editorial board - same question. No response?
The book is called Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. The author is Ha-Joon Chang.
Here is the Amazon review:
During his childhood, Chang (Kicking Away the Ladder), a respected
economist at the University of Cambridge, witnessed the beginnings of
Korea's postwar economic miracle as Gen. Park Chung-Hee's dictatorship
(despite its corrupt machinations) set the economic groundwork that
would lift Korea out of poverty. Though Korea's strategies are
heretical to first world, free-market economists, Chang argues that the
world's wealthiest nations historically relied on the same heavy-handed
protectionist approaches in their quests for economic hegemony. These
wealthy, first world economies, which preach free market and free trade
to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's
markets and to pre-empt the emergence of possible competitors are
Chang's bad Samaritans. Chang builds his outsider stance through a
history of capitalism and globalization and stories of other struggling
countries' economic transformations.
This from another reviewer of the book:
South Korea, according to Chang, got where it is through high
tariffs, state-owned businesses, restrictions on foreign capital,
budget deficits, low interest rates, tolerance of inflation, and a host
of other practices that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank wouldn't let a
developing nation use today. What's up with that?
If confronted with these facts, the neo-liberals who dominate economics
today would say that Korea is exceptional. But Chang retells the
history of Britain and the United States to show that, contrary to
their national myths, they too became rich through protectionism. In
fact, Chang can find no example a poor country that achieved wealth
through the IMF-endorsed policies of free trade, fiscal discipline, and
government non-intervention.
The trouble with the U.S. is we're not bad samaritans. We're
bad political-economists. America developed under rules based to
benefit Americans. Funny, huh? Who woulda thought?
Ditto Great Britain. Ditto China today.
But the free trade policies end up gutting us. Bleeding out
major sectors of our economy. Transfering democracy from our
public legislatures to international tribunals and public/private
committees of
bureaucrats and transnational chieftains. Transforming us from
the world's biggest creditor to the world's biggest debtor.
Changing huge trade surpluses into the worst trade deficits in the
history of the world.
I guess it doesn't work for either developing or developed
countries.
Britain went free trade before us, and look where it got them. A
historical Disney theme park. Cool phone booths. Quaint
cabs. Soldiers wearing funny hats guarding the gates of a palace
or two.
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