The principle behind free trade is fairly simple: we are collectively better off when we trade freely.
An example: in Zimbabwe, it is currently [very] expensive to produce sugar. Costs of labour are high, economies of scale are not what they were, and all expenses are denominated in US dollars while the regional competition watch their currencies depreciate against it. According to this article, Zimbabwean sugar sells at a 60% premium to the landed price of sugar from the sub-Saharan region.
If Zimbabwe were to trade in sugar (in exchange for something else – say, diamonds), then:
- Zimbabweans in general will be able to buy more sugar; and
- The regional sugar producers will make more sales
Sure, the Zimbabwean sugar industry would shut down (it can’t compete), but it was an inefficient use of resources anyway (compared to the rest of the region). Besides, all those sugar industry resources can now be used to extract more diamonds.
Everyone wins.
In principle.
Only, wicked and populist and interfering governments like to stop free trade, because they just don’t have the moral fortitude to stay the course and let the sugar farmers become diamond miners.
And they lack the moral fortitude because, In the interim, there are going to be some angry unemployed folks at the sugar industry – and those self-interested elected officials will lose votes (and funding).
So they impose tariffs and trade quotas in order to protect local industry. And then you get the neoliberalists at places like the Economist presenting this sort of graph*:
*the graph is wikipedia’s. Find the original here.
So you see, there’s a graph with pink regions that clearly demonstrates that society is losing when tariffs (or any other protectionist measure) prevent free trade from happening.
Those naughty left-wingers with their populism.
Bah.
The Trouble With Free Trade
Problem 1: The playing field is not a level one.
I realise that this sounds like a trite observation: but it’s an important one.
The world is split between developed and the developing nations. If free trade is the policy going forward, then the developed countries will continue to specialise in those areas where they have an advantage (technology, innovation, services), and the developing countries will continue to supply them with the raw materials to do it.
In other words, the only areas where the developing countries have even a comparative trade advantage are in industries that are labour-intensive. And those are the industries that they will focus on, because that is where they can compete.
The easiest way for them to compete is to continue to breed large populations to keep labour costs low and competitive relative to the technological advances of the developed world. So they’ll just stay “developing” – because that’s where their trade advantage lies.
The bottom line: free trade primarily benefits the already-developed countries.
Problem 2: who does the “societal loss” belong to?
The gains from cheaper imports will accrue to the foreign competition: being those large firms that have come to dominate the world stage.
Agreed: the Zimbabwean public will have access to cheaper sugar. But let’s extrapolate that benefit to almost everything being imported. What happens to a country that closes all its industries that cannot compete, to be left only with an importing retail industry? It runs up trade deficits, runs out of foreign exchange, and its exchange rate rapidly depreciates until its local industries can become competitive again.
But at that point, those local industries have been infrastructurally decimated, and it may not be a question of cheapness: it may just be too late.
Problem 3: that graph is misleading
That little picture of societal loss above makes the assumption that sugar workers can just become diamond miners and they can do it today. That is: if a local industry dies, the economy as a whole will still demand goods at the same level that it did before.
Which just isn’t true.
When that tariff falls away, the demand curve shifts inward as the economy loses the buying power of those sugar workers that no longer have jobs. It’s not a static scenario: it’s dynamic.
The real question is whether the societal loss of the tariff is greater than the society’s loss of the purchasing power of the former sugar-workers.
And that answer is not so self-evident.
Finally, I guess the real problem (in my mind) where free trade is concerned is that it’s not accompanied by mobility of labour. We’ve created artificial nation lines on a map and then fenced them off with border control and red tape. Now, the WTO wants the movement of goods to be free of the red tape: but not the people that are involved in their manufacture.
That’s just not fair. If the manufactured goods can flow freely, then the labour must flow freely as well. Otherwise, you have labour forces that are either cursed, or blessed, by nothing other than geography – with no right to make the best of it.
PS: apologies for the late post. Travelling out of Johannesburg in the rain has been a full day affair.
Comments
Alex F.W. McCall December 11, 2013 at 09:29
I could not be confused with a socialist-marxist-communist-anti-colonialist freedom-fighter by any measure but: I wonder if a certain level of strategic protectionism is a good solution to the pigeon-hole-ing issue you highlight in your post, particularly South Africa. My first premise is that an expanding economy follows from the (efficient) exploitation of new or expanding resources, whether it be natural or human. My second is that (at least in South Africa) the efficient exploitation of both natural and human resources is getting harder to come by for various reasons (politics and trade unions – though you’d like that). The latter example will foreseeably become a wider pattern in the rest of this continent, as democratic ideals become better entrenched, which is bad for business (somehow, I don’t see Africa following the Asian Tiger phenomenon, grounded in cheap, skilled labour willing to delve the earth for riches or hash together Nike sneakers for a pittance). How then do you create more work and increase productivity (in whatever), without necessarily having more resources or more skilled people? Is protectionism not the answer? Take, for example, the poultry-dumping issue with Brazil – by discouraging the dumping of cheap chicken from an over-producer of that resource, we have created greater scope for chicken producers at home. Wealthier/growing chicken farmers = more paid employees in the chicken industry. Yes, chicken will be more expensive but (a) food always gets more expensive anyway and the price of food never realistically decreases; (b) God knows people will never stop eating chicken, and (c) more taxes will be paid by chicken producers and chicken consumers. Win-win? We grow our economy in a sustainable fashion. This does not discount the role of trade – we could never realistically consume all of (eg) the platinum we do manage to produce, and there are countries which don’t have any platinum of their own. If we applied this especially to clothing and textiles, could we not revive that horribly ravaged industry? I’m not an economomologistician, so there are probably more than a few huge flaws of logic in this – what do you think?
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