Economics

出口商品的进口

Nov 26, 2015 Ricardo Hausmann

坎布里奇——一个国家的发展战略是否应特别关注出口？毕竟，出口无关于满足当地民众的教育、医疗、住房、电力、供水、电信、安全、法治和娱乐等基本需求。那么，为什么要优先满足相距甚远的异国消费者的需求？

简言之，这个问题就是自由贸易和经济全球化的众多反对者——以及众多坚信对所有行业应当一视同仁的右翼人士——想要知道的。但如果问题本身就是伪命题，那么答案就可想而知了。恰恰因为政府关心本国民众，他们才更要关注出口。

要想弄懂这一点，必须明白什么才是市场经济的根本。某些人，包括佛朗西斯教皇在内，认为市场经济的根本是贪婪——在市场经济体系中，人们只关心自己的利益。

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 16 Comments on this article

Alvaro Rojas Ferreira Dec 11, 2015

I completely disagree with the narrative of the article. Money further than merely tracking value, allow those with more of it to impose on those with few of it. Beliving that markets are gift exange systems is equivalent to beliving that warshe are a child's games.

I understand exports can be an option to provide new markets to certain products and therefore generate economic value, but without carful planning and monitoring this option can become a door to sell countries resources at an environmental and social price that highly surpass the economic benefits.
- Eugenio Caldararo Mar 6, 2017
  
  In a market economy nobody can impose anything. That's the concept of free market, it's free. Someone with money cannot make you do anything unless you accept that option rather than other option. So you offer your work for a salary, because that's the best you can do to offer something to this society, and you are totally uncapable of gathering people and convince them to offer better goods and servicios, and with that salary you spend with liberty on the goods and services you want, because you cannot do better those things by yourself for others.
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lakshma reddy Dec 11, 2015

Market economy like a gift exchange system is pure distortion of economics as a science. Your categorisation of goods and services as tradable and non tradable and exchange of said goods and services among resident and non resident town or country people as exports and further exports drives the productivity and quality is a trash simple of economic analysis of capitalist drive.

It only speaks of lack of understanding of underlying factors that determine the value and global value vis a vis the market prices at local and global level and as a consequence of distribution of incomes and profits after taxes to state or its agencies and includes interests.

Please note that Adamsmith,recardo and later Marx have analysed the production and reproduction process in capitalism but that does not necessarily deal with ownership, management and control and it's consequential distribution of revenues and also have not adequately dealt with effects of political processes and decisions on economics of natural capitalist process that too in nationally controlled globalised capitalist working.
Your comment on Pope Francis is unwarranted and his observations as an onlooker of daily global economic reality in its relationship with poor countries and their living standards as well their local resources and environment are to be taken seriously and sincere search for underlying reasons for global inequalities to be searched for and remedies found. I hope you will do justice to the subject.
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Pavlos Papageorgiou Dec 1, 2015

Lack of a tradable sector, or one that is too small compared to the domestic economy is the root of Greece's problems. No matter how productively or not barbers trade with lawyers, and no matter how effectively or not they're taxed, if money leaves the economy to pay for cars and smartphones faster than money comes in the economy will go down.

A country like Greece has two choices: Protectionism, such as having its own currency, will at least cure the imbalance. But it'll end up in a lower equilibrium than what's possible. A free trade zone, with English speaking firms and English laws, making export goods would do more for a country like Greece than all the concessions in the world.
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Stephen Siamai Kromah Nov 30, 2015

However, I really enjoyed reading the article; your argument. Very stimulating for preparation for home study on my stay home today for national holiday in Liberia; William V. S. Tubman birth anniversary.
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Stephen Siamai Kromah Nov 30, 2015

I do not disagree strongly with argument. But it is a novel idea. For example, it seems rather than "money merely tracks the value of the gifts", it is the other way around. Financial trading (financial services) is more over industrial productivity. This is why the new jobs not being created as often as expected. Global funds moving around for earning interests, as compared to "making profit", with less goods moving around like that, and leaving behind trail of debts. Just take a keen look again at the global funds' movement; please.
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Stephen Siamai Kromah Nov 30, 2015

This the transition which my country Liberia failed in the late 1950s and early 1960s to make plan for; with the opening up and boom of iron ore mines - Liberia Mining Company, National Iron Ore Company, LAMCO, and Bone Mine.
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Emilio Zuniga Nov 30, 2015

Exports are very important to emerging economies, because they provide the Foreign exchange needed to expand important non tradables goods, from electricity, health, roads, schools, all of wich raise productivity snd incomes of people. Tradable goods will always need to be in balance with non tradables, never is one or another.
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Robbie Jena Nov 29, 2015

Better import and export comes from heavy duty Industrial Ecosystems...your choice...
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Panagiotis Papastavrou Nov 28, 2015

Especially interesting.
May I add what I call "internal exports"
Tourists are par excellence a captive market.
Strategy should address tourists needs and their disposition -buying mood-to spend.
Greece with 20million tourists could increase substantially the GDP
P.j.Papastavrou
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John Peterson Nov 27, 2015

This post seems to lean toward export-promotion policies like the export-import bank, even though I doubt that is the author's intent. Shouldn't policy focus on "people's basic needs" and encourage unencumbered markets, including foreign trade markets, as much as possible, and let the forces of comparative advantage (not competitive advantage or government trade promotion policies) determine trade patterns?
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Walter Gingery Nov 27, 2015

"Those engaged in tradable activities are like the national team: we should all root for them -- and organize ourselves to make sure they succeed."

What, then, should we do when they seize control of trade policy to shift production overseas, throw millions out of work, hollow out the middle class, destroy unions, strip workers of their pension rights, all merely with the aim of showering themselves with riches?

There is a lot more to be said on this subject; the TPP must be defeated.
- Steve Hurst Nov 27, 2015
  
  Indeed, for what can we make of Venezuela where a basic like toilet paper is in desperately short supply due to manipuation of the dual currency exchange mechanism. There is no such animal as a free market
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Steve Hurst Nov 27, 2015

If you think making a trade is making a gift believe me you have a problem

Pope Francis, what a laugh, the church offer is an intangible
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Charles St Pierre Nov 27, 2015

Trade 'experts' are so clueless on the effects of trade, in particular the effects on an economy of running a trade surplus or a trade deficit. All you have to do is shift the aggregate demand curve on your little macro diagram to the right, for a country running a trade surplus, and to the left, for a country running a trade deficit, and analyze the situation from there. The country with a surplus shifts into a growth spiral, with inflationary pressures; the country with a deficit shifts into a contractionary spiral, with deflationary pressures. This is just what the data shows. Consider the US and China. Or Germany and its victims in the EU.

I analyzed this years ago, but since I am not in the economics clique, I can't get anybody to pay attention.
But, if you are interested, I have several posts on trade at my blog: anamecon.blogspot.com
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Procyon Mukherjee Nov 27, 2015

If we summarize what Hausmann is trying to say, it boils down to factor advantages as drivers of trade. But factor advantages are passé; quest for value is the new driver. Those focusing on mining and basic manufacturing would know this so well.
Factor advantages differentiated regions for a long time; Africa, South America and Australia had inherent advantages in Mining, while Asia extended from Mining to manufacturing. Europe and North America on the other hand moved up the value chain and anchored on the advantages of producing capital goods that allowed them to move to the more sophisticated manufacturing systems. Only Japan and later on South Korea were the two outliers in Asia.

But factor advantages were no more the bone of contention. It was the search for value that made the West look for opportunities; the genesis of comparative advantage was lost in the search for value. To take an example imagine an iPhone, which gets deigned in U.S. alone, sources its inputs from 30 countries all over the world and manufactures everything in China to be shipped to U.S. for warehousing and distribution to 100 countries around the world. The manufacturing value added is not even 20% of the value of the product. So by all means it is in U.S. that the bulk of the value added actually resides, followed by China. In automotive, for a protracted period, the design, engineering and tooling was done outside of U.S. and thus a significant portion of the value added resided outside of U.S. The balance shifted with the rising power of financing as a value added.
Financing as a value added in the whole equation changed the concept of comparative advantage. Imagine a small country like Switzerland, having almost no natural resource or any factor advantage, could actually develop such high levels of sophistication in their financial services industry that it became one of the dominant sectors of their economy, above agriculture or industry.

Ricardo, could not even dream of predicting Switzerland to be the amongst the highest per capita income economies of the world, going by his thesis on comparative advantage, which relied on factor advantages alone. In fact there is a poem in Bengali, written sometime around the late 1800, which chirped, ‘Switzerland is a poor country amongst the Europeans’ as it relied on basic farming in those days. The industrial resurgence after the Second World War, when the Swiss Mills & Machine Tool factories where the only ones surviving the war, the rapid strides made in manufacturing 'value add' moved into further sophistication in a range of industries including Pharmaceuticals. But the icing on the cake was provided by the services sector led by the financial services.
What is true for economies of the world is true for business as well. When you aim for the highest end of the product or process stream, you create the traction for talent to search for the best in class in everything, not the most economic always maybe. Such traction forces you to reconfigure everything from design to engineering to processes and people to be only the best in class. That is a huge pressure to tune to a beat that is so supremely fixated on doing the best in everything. You are then committed to a credo where you cannot make compromises on anything and when you are surrounded by the best, you are on a different competitive plain.
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