Friday, April 15, 2011

get the ball rolling again . . .

Food for thought:

Moreover, while talking the talk of liberalization, developed countries often liberalized where convenient and resisted liberalization where inconvenient. This has been particularly true in the case of agriculture, where developing countries often have significant comparative advantage. Industrialized countries flooded African markets with deeply subsidized cotton, displacing and threatening the livelihoods of African farmers who produced cotton at two-thirds of the importers' cost.  Thus, even though developed countries gave millions of dollars for development and insisted that the poor should work to help themselves, they continued to block opportunities for efficient but poor foreign producers who attempted to help themselves by competing on the merits. Journalist Martin Wolf calls this phenomenon the "Hypocrisy of the Rich." 

-Eleanor Fox, Economic Development, Poverty and Antitrust: The Other Path (2007).

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