And as few shrimp fishermen and textile operatives on the Indian subcontinent as possible?
>The interests of textile workers in Bengla Desh v. North Carolina
>is an unavoidably pesky issue which we've gone around before.
>I will only note that it distracts from the broader issue of whether
>liberalization is succeeding in its own terms -- whether it is
>delivering the goods or not. On the evidence of the latest EPI
>study that I quoted, and Dean Baker's a few months ago, among
>others, it is not. The neo-liberal success stories seem to be
>dominated by managed economies with managed trade
>policies.
I have no objection to taxing consumption luxuries up the wazoo in order to subsidize imports of machine tools by firms that have demonstrated competence at exporting. The objection is to tariffs and quotas that turn into ways of transferring wealth to the son-in-law of the Vice Minister of Finance. The ability to run a managed trade policy is rare: remember when the ITC imposed a tariff of 141% non laptop screens and a tariff of 0% on laptops? Bye-bye, laptop assembly in Cupertino and Austin. Hello, laptop assembly in Cork and Singapore...
Brad DeLong