Free Trade: Fact or Fiction?: Part 8 – Lazy Japanese and Thieving Germans
·1443 words·7 mins
This post examines the two most common non-economic explanations for why poor countries stay poor: corruption and culture. It evaluates the empirical relationship between corruption and growth, asks why culturally identical countries at different levels of development exhibit different behavioral patterns, and traces the historical use of cultural argument as post-hoc justification for development outcomes.