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be equated with geographic distance. Places with efficient transport connections, like Hong Kong or Singapore,
are closer economically to Los Angeles than, say, a town in southern Mexico.
Technical, organizational, and social change has reduced global transport and communications costs. This
is now leading to an unprecedented degree of mobility of human, financial and physical capital, of entrepre-
neurship, and of entire firms. The owners of these mobile production factors, who wish to supply world mar-
kets, are increasingly "shopping around" the world for the labor and the style of government administration that
promise them a high rate of return (and low risks). Thus, more and more companies are becoming "locational
innovators".
Internationally, this has led to the phenomenon of globalization, which makes it imperative for the immo-
bile production factors to become internationally competitive. High labor costs, adversarial industrial relations,
productivity-inhibiting work practices, a costly legal system, and a high tax burden are conditions that make
countries unattractive to globally mobile factors of production. By contrast, low labor-unit costs and efficient
administration are market signals with which the new industrial countries (especially in East Asia) have made
themselves highly attractive to mobile resources. The influx of mobile Western firms has raised their productiv-
ity, which further enhances the attractiveness of these locations even if hourly wage rates are gradually rising
there.
Producers who are losing their locational advantage of being near the central markets can react in one of
two ways. They can be defensive by, for example, "Korea-bashing" in order to obtain political patronage, tariff
protection, or "voluntary" import restraints. Or they can be proactive and competitive, raising the productivity
in the center and specializing on those goods and services that still incur high transport costs and therefore still
enjoy a degree of spatial monopoly. The mature high-income economies at the center of the world economic
system tend to have the best innovative potential, and they can use this to remain attractive in the era of global-
ization. They are more likely to succeed if they abandon political and social regulations that impede innovation,
such as a legal system that raises the costs of innovation. In time, competitive producers in central locations of
the global economy will also discover that the competitive new industrial countries will develop high import
demand for many specialties produced by the advanced central economies.
Economic theory suggests, and history confirms, that defensive responses are very rarely sustainable over
the long term. Indeed, economic openness to trade and factor mobility has been the most powerful antidote to
"rent-seeking" (the use of restrictive political influence to secure artificial market niches). In open economies
political and bureaucratic power has been channeled in support of mobile producers and to create an investment
climate in which footloose production factors can thrive. This explains why modern industrialization took off in
Europe, where small, open states were compelled by their citizens to develop institutions of limited govern-
ment, the rule of law, property rights, and support for commercial competitors, whereas the closed economy of
Imperial China stagnated under arbitrary despotism, despite the much more advanced state of Chinese technical
know-how. Openness to trade and factor movements (with the help of the transport and communications indus-
tries that have made such movements increasingly feasible) have indeed been among the prime movers of eco-
nomic progress.
THIRD WORLD DEBT
By Kenneth Rogoff
By the end of 1990 the world's poor and developing countries owed more than $1,3 trillion to industrialized
countries. Among the largest problem debtors were Brazil ($116 billion), Mexico ($97 billion) and Argentina
($61 billion). Of the total developing-country debt, roughly half is owed to private creditors, mainly commer-
cial banks.
The rest consists of obligations to international lending organizations such as the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and to governments and government agencies – export-import banks, for ex-
ample. Of the private bank debt, the bulk has been incurred by middle-income countries, especially in Latin
America. The world's poorest countries, mostly in Africa and South Asia, were never able to borrow substantial
sums from the private sector and most of their debts are to the IMF, World Bank, and other governments.
Third World debt grew dramatically during the seventies, when bankers were eager to lend money to de-
veloping countries. Although many Third World governments defaulted on their debts during the thirties, bank-
ers had put that episode out of their minds by the seventies. The mood of the time is perhaps best captured in
the famous proclamation by the Citibank chairman at the time, Walter Wriston, that lending to governments is
safe banking because sovereign nations do not default on their debts.
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