"Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade"

Ha-Joon Chang, Reader in the Political Economy of Development, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

DATE:	Monday, April 7, 2008
TIME:	4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
PLACE:	IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
FORMAT:	Colloquium
SPONSORS:	Center for Korean Studies, Center for Latin American Studies

---

Over the last 25 years, most developing countries have experienced a slowdown in growth, rising inequality and increased economic instability. The outcome is, Ha-Joon Chang contends, due to the policies imposed on them by the rich countries and the international organizations they control — free trade, free international investment, privatization, stronger protection of intellectual property rights and conservative macroeconomic policies. These are not the policies rich countries used when they themselves were developing countries nor are they policies used by more recent development success stories. Featuring Alexander Hamilton, the Lexus, Nokia mobile phone, his son, Orson Welles and an elephant, Chang’s talk argues for a fundamental reform of the international economic system and for national policies focused on raising long-term productivity(mostly) in manufacturing.

Ha-Joon Chang is a Reader in the Political Economy of Development at Cambridge University and a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is the author of Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective and Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

About Bad Samaritans

"The best riposte [to contemporary globalization] from the critics that I have seen." – Paul Blustein, Washington Post Book World, February 17, 2008

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies.