"colonies are nations specializing in bad trade"

Ontem referi isto:

[Moi ici: Escreverei mais tarde sobre como isto se relaciona com a notícia recente das 14 concessões para exploração mineira, e com o objectivo da Galp de ser responsável pela produção de 30% do hidróxido de lítio na Europa]

 Presumo que muitos milhões de euros dos contribuintes entrarão nestas negociatas feitas às escondidas.  Não se fiquem só pela exploração mineira, acrescentem-lhe a ideia de produzir hidrogénio para o vender na Holanda. Esta semana tive a oportunidade de ler:

"The American Civil War is a prototype conflict between free traders and raw materials exporters (the South) on the one hand and the industrializing class (the North) on the other. Today's poor countries are the nations where the South' has won the political conflicts and civil wars. Opening up too early for free trade makes the South' the political winners."

Trecho retirado de "How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor" de Erik S. Reinert.

Do mesmo livro sublinho:

"It became increasingly clear to me that the mechanisms of wealth and poverty had, during several historical periods, been much better understood than they are today. My 1980 Ph.D. thesis attempted to check the validity of Antonio Serra's seventeenth-century theory of development and underdevelopment. Serra is a very important person in this account because he was the first economist to produce a theory of uneven economic development in 1613, his Breve trattato or `Brief treatise'. Very little is known of Serra's life apart from the fact that he was a jurist who wrote a book when he was in jail in Naples. He sought to explain why his home town of Naples remained so poor in spite of its bountiful natural resources, while Venice, precariously built on a swamp, was at the very centre of the world's economy. The key, he argued, was that Venetians, barred from cultivating the land like the Neapolitans, had been forced to rely on their industry to make a living, harnessing the increasing returns to scale offered by manufacturing activities. In Serra's view the key to economic development was to have a large number of different economic activities, all subject to the falling costs of increasing returns. Paradoxically, being poor in natural resources could be a key to becoming wealthy.

...

In the early 1700s a rule of thumb developed for economic policy in bilateral trade, a rule that rapidly spread throughout Europe. When a country exported raw materials and imported industrial goods, this was considered bad trade. When the same country imported raw materials and exported industrial goods, this was considered good trade

...

colonies are nations specializing in bad trade, in exporting raw materials and importing high technology goods, whether these are industrial goods or from a knowledge-intensive service sector."

Depois não se queixem de não sairmos da cepa torta.