Business/Markets/Stocks/Economics Random, Random

[mmmm8]

And Japan, China and S. Korea built strong economies on highly protectionist trade systems. Some of their methods were simply restricting imports, tariffs be damned.
I believe that S. America will never be able to become industrialized nations unless we impose such restrictions.

Famously tried and failed. This was the main policy for most South American countries in the mid-20th century. I know you know this, so what do you think could be done differently to make it succeed?

[Suliso]

Japan, China and South Korea are also strongly export oriented economies. Were South American countries too?

[mmmm8]

Japan, China and South Korea are also strongly export oriented economies. Were South American countries too?

Not at the height of the effort, which was focused on import substitution.

But most recently Argentina tried to become a cell phone exporter and they recently finally gave up.

[ponchi101]

I do not think that we can become competitive in high tech markets. But the problem is that we don't even produce mid tech products. Brasil does, to an extent, but we need to be able to produce our washers, dryers, coffee machines and middle-of-the-road stuff like that.
Argentina failed because what they were doing was assembling cell phones, not developing them from scratch. I don't know if they could have done it, but they aimed too high.
We need to build parts like auto parts; not a full car itself, but alternators, fuel injection systems and related. Then, in 25-30 years, we may try to make something more developed.
But if we insist in doing nothing more than exchange coffee beans and cocoa and vegetables, and crude oil and minerals, I don't know how the creation of wealth can happen. If our model is to trade 1 Tonne of cocoa beans for one iPhone, I don't see our way out.
(Anyway, I don't see our way out regardless of what we do).

[mmmm8]

I disagree with you on mid-tech. What you need is to build tech of the future that no one else is currently building at a scale. That's why I gave the Taiwanese example. They (really just a handful of people) saw the future is semiconductors and were able to corner the market until recently, driving other development.You can drive some development with auto parts but that is just similar to the textile industries in Colombia and Peru. Lots of activity until somewhere else became cheaper. Of course, then the question is what happens to the capital. Is it reinvested into more development, or does it go into private US bank accounts and the "old" (natural resources/agriculture) industry?

The other road to building wealth is Norway. Don't build industries, just use the money you get very well.