Comparative Advantage?

Kia-ora

Even Ricardo never suggested that Britain give up making wine altogether, or Portugal textiles.

Comparative_advantage 

In fact no country has ever succeeded on exports alone, without a healthy internal economy.

And no country has ever succeeded in benefiting from an export economy without State support of the export sector.

Of course, our pursuit of pure free markets has worked so well? How much has our number of people in poverty increased by, again?

Ha-Joon on free trade.

""Almost all of today’s rich countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies.

Contrary to the popular myth, Britain had been an aggressive user, and in certain areas a pioneer, of activist policies intended to promote its industries. Such policies, although limited in scope, date back from the 14^th century (Edward III) and the 15^th century (Henry VII) in relation to woollen manufacturing, the leading industry of the time.  England then was an exporter of raw wool to the Low Countries, and Henry VII for example tried to change this by taxing raw wool exports and poaching skilled workers from the Low Countries.

Particularly between the trade policy reform of its first Prime Minister Robert Walpole in 1721 and its adoption of free trade around 1860, Britain used very dirigiste trade and industrial policies, involving measures very similar to what countries like Japan and Korea later used in order to develop their industries. During this period, it protected its industries a lot more heavily than did France, the supposed dirigiste counterpoint to its free-trade, free-market system. Given this history, argued Friedrich List, the leading German economist of the mid-19^th century, Britain preaching free trade to less advanced countries like Germany and the USA was like someone trying to “kick away the ladder” with which he had climbed to the top.""