South Korean institutional economist, currently at SOAS University of London, previously at the University of Cambridge. Chang is the leading contemporary documentarian of the historical pattern that every country that industrialized did so behind protective tariffs, state investment, and directed credit before adopting free-trade doctrine once dominant. His Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002) built the case in explicit dialogue with Friedrich List, from whom the “ladder” metaphor is drawn.
Chang’s thesis is that today’s developed countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries when they were in catching-up positions, and are now denying developing countries the very tools they used, by promoting free-trade doctrine and constraining industrial policy through the World Trade Organization and structural adjustment. Britain’s woollen industry protection ran for centuries up to the 1846 liberal reforms. United States tariff averages remained among the highest in the world through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Germany accorded strong protection to iron and steel under Bismarck. Post-war Japan and Korea coordinated industrial policy through state banks and export-led development.
Chang belongs on this list as one of the two contemporary economic historians (with Erik Reinert) whose peer-reviewed work moves the retention-tradition claims from Structural Inference to Documented Fact. His causal claims about the specific contribution of tariffs to industrial growth are contested by orthodox economic historians such as Douglas Irwin on attribution grounds. This wiki treats Chang’s historical documentation as robust and his causal claims as contested Academic Inference, and cites him accordingly.
Related pages
- Erik Reinert
- Friedrich List
- Throughput, Retention, Regenerative: The Three Lineages
- The BioConomy Developmental Arc
Sources
- Chang, H. J. (2002). Kicking Away the Ladder
Provenance
Extracted from Section 1 of the Research Brief: The S-Curve Thesis.