나쁜 사마리아인들: 자유무역의 신화와 자본주의의 비밀역사 by 장하준

[Khan(김동규)]

매주 발행되는 이코노미스트 잡지에서, 제일 먼저 보는 것은 Books and Arts 코너이다.

매주 몇권의 책을 소개하는데, 이번 주에는 한국저자의 책을 소개하고 있다.

 제목: 나쁜 사마리아인들- 자유무역의 신화와 자본주의의 비밀역사

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

저자: 장하준 Ha-Joon Chang

출판사: Random House

선한 사마리아인은 들어봤는데, 악한 사마리아인은 대체 어떤 사람들일까요?

장하준 교수(캠브리지 대학)은 2002년 "사다리 걷어차기(Kicking Away the Ladder). "라는 책의 썼다. 책의 내용은 선진국이 과거에 산업발전을 위해 자신들이 해왔던 행동(관세, 정부보조금 지급)을 지금은 개발도상국들에게 하지 말라고 한다는 것. 자신은 사다리를 타고 지붕에 올라가서, 이제는 필요없다고 차버린 후, 나중에 올라오는 사람들에겐 사다리없이 올라오라고 하는 것과 같은 셈.

이 책은 나쁜 사마리아인들이 가난한 나라에 해를 끼치는 일을 그만두게 할 수 있는가에 관해 이야기한 책으로, '세계화'와 '개방'만을 강조하는 신자유주의적 조류에 대한 반박논리를 제공한다. 먼저 세계화의 신화와 진실, 부자나라 부 생성 과정을 살펴보며, '역사적 사실'이라고 생각했지만 실제로는 잘못되었거나 부분적인 진실에 불과한 것들을 소개한다.

그런 다음 경제 발전과 관련하여 정통적 지혜라고 일컬어지는 것들을 뒤집기 위한 작업을 한다. 경제 이론, 역사, 당대의 증거들을 혼합하여 외국인 투자는 규제해야 하는지, 민간기업이 좋고 공기업은 나쁜 것인지, 아이디어 차용은 잘못인지, 부패하고 비민주적인 나라는 외면해야 하는지, 경제발전에 유리한 민족성이 있는지 등을 알아본다.

또한 마지막에는 개발도상국들이 경제를 발전시킬 수 있도록 하기 위해 원조자들이 행동 방침을 정할 때 고려해야 할 원칙들을 제시하였다. 이를 통해 과연 나쁜 사마리아인들은 자유 무역과 자유시장을 설파하는 대신 어떤 일을 해야 하는지를 알 수 있다. 특히 유명한 책과 영화 등을 소재로 유쾌하면서도 신랄한 대답을 안겨준다.

Economic development

Pistols at dawn

Aug 30th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
By Ha-Joon Chang



Random House; 276 pages; £18.99; to be published in America in December; $26.95

Buy it at
Amazon.co.uk

AMERICA'S greatest treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, met an untimely death in a duel in 1804. But his economic ideas keep firing back. In his 1791 “Report on the Subject of Manufactures”, he quarrelled with the free-trade doctrines of Adam Smith and other liberal economists. He believed the government should shelter and nurse American industry through its infancy until it was strong enough to stand against Britain's manufacturing might. Critics of free trade have reached for this “infant industry” argument ever since.

미국의 위대한 재무장관, 알렉산더 해밀턴은 1804년 결투에서 예기치 않은 죽음을 맞이하였다. 그러나 그의 경제사상은 계속해서 방아쇠를 당기고 있다. 1791년 "제조업자에 대한 보고서"에서 그는 아담 스미스와 다른 자유경제학자들의 자유무역주의에 대해 논쟁을 벌이고 있다. 그는, 영국의 제조업능력에 맞서 충분히 강해질때까지, 정부는 걸음마 단계를 지날때까지는, 자국의 산업을 보호하고 육성하여야 한다고 믿었다. 자유무역 반대론자들은 해밀톤이후 이러한 걸음마산업(infant industry)논쟁을 계속하고 있다.

The latest thinker to pick up Hamilton's flintlock is Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University. According to Mr Chang, the rich nations that now hector the poor on the importance of free trade, respect for intellectual property and hospitality to foreign investors broke all of those rules when they themselves were clambering up the development ladder. They are telling the poor world to “do as we say, not as we did”, he argues.  

Mr Chang made his name with his 2002 book “Kicking Away the Ladder”. That work provides much of the scholarly gunpowder for “Bad Samaritans”. But in this more polemical tract, he adds the spark of personal reflection (he grew up in South Korea, which he believes owes its economic success more to Hamilton's ideas than to Smith's) and some mischievous rhetorical set-pieces.

He opens his book with a mock article from The Economist, published in 2039, which looks back at the unlikely rise of a world-beating hydrogen fuel-cell maker in Mozambique. The fuel-cell division prospered only after a long and costly apprenticeship, bleeding money for 17 years. The article is based, Mr Chang says, on a real piece about South Korea's Samsung, which is now one of the world's leading exporters of semiconductors, having started life as an exporter of fish, vegetables and fruit. And the 17 years of red ink, Mr Chang points out, is the length of time Nokia's electronics division lost money.

When he isn't imagining the future, Mr Chang curates awkward historical facts calculated to discomfort neoliberals. He takes particular delight in puncturing the free-trade pretensions of the British. In 1860, 84 years after the publication of “The Wealth of Nations”, Britain forswore most import duties. But in earlier decades Britain had prospered behind manufacturing tariffs as high as 55%. It also invented some of the tricks and contrivances now associated with East Asia's aggressive export promotion, such as allowing exporters to reclaim duties paid on imported inputs.

Mr Chang argues that neoliberals have either forgotten or rewritten this “secret history”. Supported by a “financial-intellectual complex”, these ideologues urge poor countries to open up in the mistaken belief that free trade secured the West's own prosperity.

But here Mr Chang's own grip on the historical record is a bit shaky. Liberalism owes its resurgence in developing countries not to a “selective amnesia” about the 19th century, but to their recent and painful memory of post-war failure. In that period, many poor countries turned their back on trade with tragi-comic results. Cosseted industries turned out finished goods that were worth less than the imported materials from which they were made. Thomas Jefferson had warned the Hamiltonians that “the use of [subsidies] has been found almost inseparable from abuse.” In post-war Africa, Latin America and South Asia, he was proved right.

Only East Asia succeeded in encouraging manufacturing without discouraging exports. This was not an easy trick to pull off—import tariffs act as a tax on exporters, a burden the state had to offset with subsidies, duty drawbacks and cheap credit. Some scholars still wonder if this meddling was worth the risk and expense.

These devices were not the only thing the tigers had going for them. At the time of Mr Chang's birth in 1963, South Korea was blessed with a young, literate and biddable workforce; it also lacked large tracts of arable land or rich deposits of natural resources. Even without the visible hand of government to guide it, the country's future clearly lay in making stuff, rather than drilling, mining or growing it. Once its military government deval‎ued the currency and loosened restrictions on imported materials, South Korea was free to fulfil its destiny. It began with light manufacturing, using simple technologies that did not require a long apprenticeship to master. Its growth was certainly impressive. But a country that saves and invests as heavily as South Korea did can arguably transform itself even without recourse to any Hamiltonian magic.

For all his scholarly verve, Mr Chang gives his readers no more than a glimpse of the lively debate that still flowers about the historical episodes he describes. His book will not settle this 200-year duel between the Hamiltonians and the liberals. But he succeeds in drawing a few flecks of blood on his opponents' waistcoats.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
By Ha-Joon Chang
Random House; 276 pages; £18.99; to be published in America in December; $26.95

[jollyman]

풋. 왠지 이 책도 읽어보고 싶어 지는군요. 흐흐. 또 돈 좀 벌어야 되겠는데요. 책 산지가 얼마나 됐다고 또 주문할 책 리스트가 채워지고 있으니...ㅡㅡ;; 하여간 책을 읽어봐야 되겠지만 이 기사 쓴 사람이 얼마나 책을 정확히 읽어냈는지에 대해서는 좀 의문이네요. 후진국들의 유아산업 정책이라는 것이 관세정책 하나만으로 이루어 진 것도 아니고 산업정책이 라틴아메리카에서는 성공할 수 없었지만 동아시아에서는 성공할 수 있었던 이유가 있었는데 그런 부분에 대해서는 이야기도 없고...(아마 장하준 교수의 책에는 그런 이야기가 있었을 걸로 보임.) 적어도 이 기사에 대해서는 조선일보랑 별 다를 바가 없는 것으로 보인다는...