>The best help you may provide to the world is to help its development: open
>trade, to let comparative advantage work; open investment, to let capital go
>where it's needed; and open borders to immigration, to alleviate temporary
>excesses of manpower and provide remittances. Once the global living
>standards will rise, the population growth will stabilize: it has always
>happened, regardless of local cultural differences. And by the way,
>encourage free scientific experimentation, avoiding silly bans on
>genetically engineered food or "ethical" worries. The only ethical thing to
>do is to let people live the life they prefer.
Well, if in multiple attempts to clone oneself, most replicas don't survive the "experiment"--do you still think human cloning is ethical?
As for free trade, please consider Pasinetti's argument (summarized by Halevi): the international prices at which a machine is imported from the advanced country might require an amount of exports from the underdeveloped country, which contain, per unit, a quantity of direct and indirect labor greater than the quantity of labor (direct and indirect) necessary to produce the machine domestically, albeit with more primitive methods. In this sense it makes perfect sense for the underdeveloped country to go ahead with its own production of capital goods.
Perhaps this is what all the worry is about: if export prices continue to remain in the sinkhole, it will be unbearable to export the quantity necessary to import machines; perhaps the revenue won't be there to continue imports and there will be a forcible reversion to domestic, albeit primitive, methods. Plus, the percentage of GDP being siphoned off to pay off interest on the loans to purchase capital goods previously can't be much help either. This would be the simple material base for the anti western sentiment and calls for defaults and protectionism that horrifies bourgeois ideologues at places like Foreign Affairs. Simply, the fate of the international trading system will be called into question.
Not quite sure what to make of Pasinetti's argument, but it does seem fascinating though naive. Wouldn't a country limiting some capital goods imports face retaliation on all its exports, including those it must sell in order to buy those capital goods that it simply cannot make at home? The point would still remain however that absolute free trade in capital goods or the acceptance of comparative advantage in only raw material or machine using industries may not always be "efficient" but rather politically imposed in terms of the interests of imperialist capital. Plus, it may be possible to reduce costs quicker in the production of home grown capital goods than in the exports that have been paying for the import of machines. Nirmal Chandra has noted that much of the Indian capital goods industry has been wiped out due to the liberalisations of the 90s.
rb
Luigi Pasinetti, 1981. Structural Change and Economic Growth, Cambridge. 194-197 Joseph Halevi, 1994 "Structure and Growth". Economique Appliquee, no 2, pp. 57-80 (thank you again Mat F for these articles)