Ha-Joon Chang - Poor Quotes

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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
Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.

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
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
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