Noah Smith has a typically excellent explainer on the role of industrialization in Poland and Malaysia, itself only a single post in a long running series on the same theme. As one might expect if one is a fan of How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, the post begins by talking about industrial policy in South Korea. From that point of reference, he delves deeper into what made Malaysia and Poland grow so very vigorously over the past three decades or so. He also speaks about the limits of the strategies adopted by these two nations towards the end of this post, but more about that later on. For the moment, I would encourage you to read this post, and to subscribe to his Substack, as I have. Phull paisa vasool, guaranteed.
Also, because I simply cannot resist, a request to all of you to ponder this chart. How can one not want to learn macro after thinking about this chart?
But before we get back to Noah’s post, a brief segue into a post I wrote a while ago:
Here is how the placement process works in almost all colleges in India. If you sit for an interview, and you’re made an offer, you’re “out” of the placement process. There are variations to this rule, but in essence, the logic is that once you and the company have struck a deal, you can’t sit for any other firm that comes on campus later.
https://econforeverybody.com/2021/02/01/so-what-are-forward-markets-what-is-speculation/
So here’s a conundrum for you: what if the company in October is a firm called HDFC, and it is offering you a package worth 8 lakh rupees (INR 800,000). The conundrum is that there is a very strong rumor (but it is, unfortunately, a rumor) that Google will be on campus next month, and they’ll be offering 20 lakh rupees (INR 2,000,000).
HDFC will pick up 20 students, but Google will pick up only 5.
Do you sit for the HDFC process or not?
What is your answer to this question? If you were that hypothetical student, would you sit for the HDFC process, or not? I’d argue it comes down to whether you are looking ot maximize your ‘profits’ or minimize your ‘risks’. If you’re the sort of person who would like to play it safe – if having a job, any job, is more important to you than having the high paying job of your dreams – then you’re likely to sit for the HDFC job process.
Note that there is no right or wrong answer here. It simply is a question of your preferences.
All right, now back to Noah’s post.
Poland and Malaysia may not be as rich as Germany or Korea, but they’ve definitely escaped poverty. Countries like Bangladesh or Vietnam or Ghana or even Mexico would kill to have a per capita GDP of $30,000. That’s about the GDP of the U.S. in the early 1980s. Is it really fair to call that level of development a “middle income trap”? If you’re a poor country, and you have a reliable, dependable way of getting as rich as the U.S. was in the early 1980s, dammit, you take it. You don’t worry about whether that strategy will eventually make it harder to get as rich as the U.S. of 2023.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-polandmalaysia-model
The issue that Noah is speaking about here is about whether option A is better or option B is better. Option A is the South Korean way, as he mentions in the next paragraph after the one I have excerpted here. This is done by ‘building a bunch of world-beating high-tech manufacturing companies from scratch’ and it is, as he says, incredibly hard. The good news is that if you get it right, you can get seriously rich as a country. The bad news is that very few countries have managed to get it right.
What is option B?
An FDI-centric strategy, on the other hand, is simple and straightforward, almost cookie-cutter — you give all your people a high school education, you build some roads and electric power lines and sewage lines, you designate some Special Economic Zones, and you give foreign companies big tax incentives and investment incentives and regulatory incentives to come in and hire your plentiful low-wage workers to make electronics and automotive goods and other complex products for export. Voila! No need to build the next Samsung or the next Hyundai; the existing Samsung and Hyundai will do nicely.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-polandmalaysia-model
The analogy that I am trying to develop here is a fairly obvious one. Option A is like Google coming to your campus. Only a few jobs on offer, and we don’t yet know for sure whether Google will actually come on campus or not. In other words, a high risk strategy. If it pays off, well, whoopee. But on the other hand, if it doens’t pay off, you’re in deep doo-doo.
Option B is like HDFC coming on campus. Relatively speaking, you’re much more likely to succeed in this endeavor. The downside? If you succeed, it won’t payoff as much as succeeding with Option A. But just as there will be students who will prefer Option B, Noah says that some countries also ought to choose the Malaysia-Poland route. Sure the success here isn’t quite as ‘sexy’, but it also does come with lower risk. And this ought to be, for some countries, therefore a very attractive proposition.
So if Poland and Malaysia haven’t found the secret to getting rich quick, perhaps they’ve found the secret to getting upper-middle-class quick. That wouldn’t be a full general solution to the problem of industrialization, but it would represent an amazing advance over what we know now. If I were a poor country, this is what I’d be looking at.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-polandmalaysia-model
Risk-rturn trade-offs, industrial policy, opportunity costs and an introduction to finance, all rolled into one smorgasbord of a blogpost. I enjoyed writing this one!