It's a bit of a dead zone for Africa, has any african country made it to industrial ?

keep to the Fen Causeway

60's: State is good, import subsitution works very well.

80's: State is bad, import subsitution works very bad.

00's: Good state is good, bad state is bad. Insitutions are very important. Import substitution generally works bad, except initially in agriculture where 80+ % of the population work.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/2003/08freetradehistory.htm

Although the Netherlands had a huge role as transit country (which it still has) before the discovery of the Slochteren gas field, without its discovery and the already present know-how to win it - wealth creation within the Netherlands would not have boosted as massively as it did. Or such is what I learned at school.

I'm surprised that Finland hasn't been mentioned so far. As far as I could determine, that was an internally driven change from mainly agriculture to high-tech knowledge industry. Don't know about levels of protectionism, though.

Still. To me it seems to boil down to two things: a country's capacity to make change happen - which is largely dependent on already present capital/wealth - or national resources without out-sourcing them completely to foreign corporations.

A piece by him and two other authors called 'What You Export Matters' is especially interesting, I think, as it has large implications for the developed world as well.

To give an extremely short summary: the paper focuses on the issue of 'cost discovery', the process by which an 'entrepeneur' by pioneering a specific technology, service or process in an economy discovers the underlying cost structure and thereby generates positive externalities for other entrepeneurs. This has the following implication:

Everything else being the same, an economy is better off producing goods that richer countries export. Standard models of comparative advantage indicate that pushing specialization up the product scale in this fashion would be bad for an economy’s health: it would simply distort production and create efficiency losses. The framework we developed in the paper, and the evidence that we offered, suggest an alternative interpretation. A country’s fundamentals generally allow it to produce more sophisticated goods than it currently produces. Countries can get stuck with lower-income goods because entrepreneurship in cost discovery entails important externalities. Countries that are able to overcome these externalities– through policies that entice entrepreneurs into new activities– can reap the bene…ts in terms of higher economic growth.

Now I would be very interested in the reverse of this argument. Can there be unlearning of the cost structure, or can an economy's performance weaken when certain sectors are diminished? (Like, say, manufacturing in Anglo-Saxon countries). Does the picture change for countries that are already wealthy; should they seek to produce a specific type of product/service, or seek the greatest possible level of diversification?

Later on it had to be supplemented with external money  both direct funds and emigration funds.

So, getting rid of some parts of protectionism was good for Spain.... but of course.. the level of protectionism still after the stabilization pact in the 60's was much more than anything that could be accepted now for any southern country.

So, protectionism elimination can be good... a large level of elimination out of the blue in a large country with no industrial base.. no I dunno any... it would be comitting economical suicide.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude