Erik Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich...

Reinert bases the book on two sources of evidence, his collection of pre-Ricardo economic texts and his personal experience as an entrepreneur and development economics academic expert. He asks, what did the rich countries believe about economics when they were becoming rich? He looks at the English before Ricardo, the Dutch in the 1600s, and the Germans from the 1600s to the 1900s. He also looks at the Morgenthau plan (the Allies' initial plan in 1945 to return Germany to a purely agricultural economy) and the later Marshall plan (to re-industrialise Germany, later applied to other European countries, Japan and Korea). He argues that all these countries set up tariff barriers to protect their developing industries and only later, once the industries were internationally competitive, removed the tariffs.

Unfortunately, Reinert does tend to repeat himself. Perhaps this is a deliberate choice to reinforce his key points, or perhaps the book originated in a series of articles and has not been properly edited. It does leave the book open to charges of proof by repetition, and it does get a bit tiresome. However, Reinert also does provide his evidence from his sources, giving his book more credibility than many anti-globalisation tracts.

The Economist had a comment that simply tells us that Reinert was wrong, and refers us to a review that is unfortunately paywalled.

Erik Reinert . How Rich Countries Got Rich... and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor. 2008, PublicAffairs, . paperback . 400 pages.

ISBN 1586486683 .