Ha-Joon Chang Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

Assume the worst about people and you get the worst.

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.

Ha-Joon Chang
Global economic competition is a game of unequal players … Consequently, it is only fair that we 'tilt the playing field' in favour of the weaker countries. In practice, this means allowing them to protect and subsidize their producers more vigorously and to put stricter regulations on foreign investment. These countries should also be allowed to protect intellectual property rights less stringently so that they can more actively 'borrow' ideas from more advanced countries.

Ha-Joon Chang
In manufacturing, where mechanization and the use of chemical processes are much easier, it is easier to raise productivity than in services. In contrast, by their very nature, many service activities are inherently impervious to productivity increase without diluting the quality of the product.

Ha-Joon Chang
The importance of international trade for economic development cannot be overemphasized. But free trade is not the best path to economic development. Trade helps economic development only when the country employs a mixture of protection and open trade, constantly adjusting it according to its changing needs and capabilities. Trade is simply too important for economic development to be left to free trade economists.

Ha-Joon Chang
Corruption exists because there is too much, not too little, market.

Ha-Joon Chang
Democracy and markets are both fundamental building blocks for a decent society. But they clash at a fundamental level. We need to balance them.

Ha-Joon Chang
Corruption often exists because there are too many market forces, not too few.

Ha-Joon Chang
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.

Ha-Joon Chang
Manufacturing is the most important... route to prosperity.

Ha-Joon Chang
Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.

Ha-Joon Chang
Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.

Ha-Joon Chang
The historical picture is clear. Counterfeiting was not invented in modern Asia. When they were backward themselves in terms of knowledge, all of today's rich countries blithely violated other people's patents, trademarks and copyrights. The Swiss 'borrowed' German chemical inventions, while the Germans 'borrowed' English trademarks and the Americans 'borrowed' British copyrighted materials—all without paying what would today be considered 'just' compensation.

Ha-Joon Chang
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.

Ha-Joon Chang
There is no hard and fast rule as to what makes a successful state-owned enterprise. Therefore, when it comes to SOE management, we need a pragmatic attitude in the spirit of the famous remark by China's former leader Deng Xiao-ping: 'it does not matter whether the cat is white or black as long as it catches mice.'

Ha-Joon Chang
Markets have a strong tendency to reinforce the status quo. The free market dictates that countries stick to what they are already good at. Stated bluntly, this means that poor countries are supposed to continue with their current engagement in low-productivity activities. But their engagement in those activities is exactly what makes them poor. If they want to leave poverty behind, they have to defy the market and do the more difficult things that bring them higher incomes—there are no two ways about it.

Ha-Joon Chang
The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.

Ha-Joon Chang
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.

Ha-Joon Chang
Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.

Ha-Joon Chang
Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.

Ha-Joon Chang
The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.

Ha-Joon Chang
Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.

Ha-Joon Chang
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.

Ha-Joon Chang
Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.

Ha-Joon Chang
Unlike what neo-liberals say, market and democracy clash at a fundamental level. Democracy runs on the principle of 'one man (one person), one vote'. The market runs on the principle of 'one dollar, one vote'. Naturally, the former gives equal weight to each person, regardless of the money she/he has. The latter give greater weight to richer people. Therefore, democratic decisions usually subvert the logic of market.

Ha-Joon Chang
History shows that, at earlier stages of economic development, corruption is difficult to control. The fact that today no country that is very poor is very clean suggests that a country has to rise above absolute poverty before it can significantly reduce venality in the system. When people are poor, it is easy to buy their dignity—starving people find it difficult not to sell their votes for a bag of flour, while under-paid civil servants will often fail to resist the temptation to take a bribe. But it is not just a matter of personal dignity. There are also more structural causes.

Ha-Joon Chang
The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.

Ha-Joon Chang
Producers in developing countries entering new industries need a period of (partial) insulation from international competition (through protection, subsidies and other measures) before they can build up their capabilities to compete with superior foreign producers. Of course, when the infant producers 'grow up' and are able to compete with the more advanced producers, the insulation should go. But this has to be done gradually. If they are exposed to too much international competition too soon, they are bound to disappear.

Ha-Joon Chang
As water flows from high to low, knowledge has always flowed from where there is more to where there is less. Those countries that are better at absorbing the knowledge inflow have been more successful in catching up with the more economically advanced nations. On the other side of the fence, those advanced nations that are good at controlling the outflow of core technologies have retained their technological leadership for longer. The technological 'arms race', between backward countries trying to acquire advanced foreign knowledge and the advanced countries trying to prevent its outflow has always been at the heart of the game of economic development.

Ha-Joon Chang
We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.

Ha-Joon Chang