@samuelszuchan: Japan, South Korea, and the United States all got rich by protecting their industries. Then they told poor countries to open theirs. The story goes like this: countries with cheap labor enter the free market, make shirts, get richer, lose the shirts, gain cars, lose the cars, and gain semiconductors and B2B SaaS. The World Bank built a playbook around it, and dozens of countries bet their development on the idea that their rung would keep rising if they played the game. But look at what those countries actually did. Japan protected its domestic market ferociously through the 1950s and 1960s behind tariff walls and keiretsu preferences. South Korea routed domestic demand through the chaebol, a captive network of firms with implicit state credit. The United States did it first and hardest, sheltering its manufacturers behind some of the highest industrial tariffs in the world from the 1810s through the 1890s, the protection Alexander Hamilton had prescribed as the first Treasury Secretary. In every case, export-led growth ran on top of a highly protected domestic market that home firms could dominate before facing global competition. The Washington Consensus told the countries that arrived after 1990 to skip that step. Compete globally on cost through open-market export platforms. No protection. No captive first market. And those countries lost their textile industries. Foreign Affairs puts China's excess exports in labor-intensive goods at roughly $355 billion a year: the developmental space poorer countries were told to compete for. Nigeria went from 350,000 textile workers in the early 1980s to below 20,000 by 2022. Chinese municipal governments still subsidize land, credit, and utilities for factories that could not survive a normal cost structure, and let them bid below cost because export rebates close the gap at year-end. The State Council told local governments to stop in March 2025. The behavior continues because local incentives have not changed. The developmental use of protection was ruled out for African countries by advice that Chinese firms never had to follow. That is the real asymmetry: not cheap labor versus expensive labor, but the fact that one set of countries was told to play by rules that the winners never actually played by.

trustonailende :

Just call it SAP. My father lost his wealth through this process.

P2?! :

Nigeria’s a great example in this context

Luca De :

Modern day 21st century colonialism

The comments :

To which market are SK and JP urging to open????

LittleTooArrogant :

Important Note: China managed to grow through Open markets despite being nominally communist.

pa6l0_the_don :

We need to hear more of this and have this understood and widely accepted when talking about why African countries are still poor and what it’s actually going to take to rise out of that poverty. African needs the chance to industrialise like everyone else.

WilMar :

When you are losing the game, change the rules. This is what the west are good at. 🤭😁😂

Candyfrombaby :

Burkina Faso is not playing though … we’d see

G Chaos :

Japan unable to protect their industry. After Plaza Accord, all Japanese company forced to use American chips. Which effectively killed Japanese chip industry. Now Japan need to relly on foreign chip such Samsung or TSMC.

Eyamakhize :

Same with white South African state. the at end of apartheid when blacks took over we were told to remove all barriers. economic bloodbath

chetan77553 :

sk have and had Samsung only

Cr1t1cT3rr04 :

The actual lesson from the successful cases: protect strategically, build real domestic capacity, then compete. Permanent protection and free-trade purism have both failed as universal rules

Hanny :

Countries get rich by being productive, not by whatever oversimplification in this video

farthgkq85o :

Not exactly. Japan produced and exported to USA post WW2. It took decades before USA decided to address this

Jonathan Scion :

check again. the US grew on free trade. periods of protectionis were periods of recession. always. same with Japan and every other country

NIMUTHU PANDULA(NIMUWA) 🤜❤️💯 :

❤️

SRAN • GYMRHAT :

Indonesia basically

alejandroechever3879 :

Imperialism was never about getting cheap labor or extracting resources from foreign countries, but rather making labor so expensive those foreign countries couldn't compete.

sasodicoski :

no matter the time line, the destination is the same for us brata 🔥💪🥰😁

Toshitab :

Yes thé récipé of thé world bank

Sevi :

Ameshitrica :

Americans become more and more ridiculous and irrational. 😂😂

Drakester :

Africa is lucky they have a lot of resources available to sell.

Mmmm7125 :

This is why import duties are a good thing. There’s always a loophole states are willing to exploit, and if they don’t, they’ll destroy their environment or working laws to get cheaper goods. It’s not a fault of capitalism, it’s a fault of globalism