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Quote by Ha-Joon Chang

“It takes time and experience to absorb new technologies, so technologically backward producers need a period of protection from international competition during this period of learning. Such protection is costly, because the country is giving up the chance to import better and cheaper products. However, it is a price that has to be paid if it wants to develop advanced industries.”

Quote by Ha-Joon Chang

Work

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity

Bad Samaritans examines the economic policies and behaviors of rich nations, analyzing how they affect the economic development and stability of poorer countries. The book investigates the root causes of global economic inequality and the potential threats these disparities pose to global prosperity. more

Author

Ha-Joon Chang
Ha-Joon Chang

Ha-Joon Chang is a Korean-born economist known for his research on development economics and issues of globalization. His works, such as '23 Billion People's Challenge' and 'Kicking Away the Ladder', challenge traditional development theories and propose new models of development. more

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“Rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves successfully used in the past.”

“As South Korea shows, active participation in international trade does not require free trade. Indeed, had South Korea pursued free trade and not promoted infant industries, it would not have become a major trading nation. It would still be exporting raw materials (e.g., tungsten ore, fish, seaweed) or low-technology, low-price products (e.g., textiles, garments, wigs made with human hair) that used to be its main export items in the 1960s.”

“All the alleged key causes of SOE [State-Owned Enterprise] inefficiency - the principal-agent problem, the free-rider problem and the soft budget constraint - are, while real, not unique to state-owned enterprises. Large private-sector firms with dispersed ownership also suffer from the principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem. So, in these two areas, forms of ownership do matter, but the critical divide is not between state and private ownership - it is between concentrated and dispersed ownerships.”

“The days are over when technology can be advanced in laboratories by individual scientists alone. Now you need an army of lawyers to negotiate the hazardous terrain of interlocking patents. Unless we find a solution to the problem of interlocking patents, the patent system may actually impede the very innovation it was designed to encourage.”

“Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.”