Mercantilism Reconsidered by Dani Rodrik - Project Syndicate 07/11/2016, 13*25

Mercantilism Reconsidered
JUL 10, 2009

CAMBRIDGE – A businessman walks into a government minister’s office and

says he needs help. What should the minister do? Invite him in for a cup of coffee
and ask how the government can be of help? Or throw him out, on the principle
that government should not be handing out favors to business?

This question constitutes a Rorschach test for policymakers and economists. On

one side are free-market enthusiasts and neo-classical economists, who believe in
a stark separation between state and business. In their view, the government’s role
is to establish clear rules and regulations and then let businesses sink or swim on
their own. Public officials should hold private interests at arm’s length and never
cozy up to them. It is consumers, not producers, who are king.

Is It Time to Abandon GDP?

Economist Edoardo Campanella examines the conceptual and technical

flaws of the world’s most important metric, and asks whether and how it
could be reformed.

This view reflects a venerable tradition that goes back to Adam Smith and
continues a proud existence in today’s economics textbooks. It is also the
dominant perspective of governance in the United States, Britain, and other

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Mercantilism Reconsidered by Dani Rodrik - Project Syndicate 07/11/2016, 13*25

societies organized along Anglo-American lines – even though actual practice

often deviates from idealized principles.

On the other side are what we may call corporatists or neo-mercantilists, who view
an alliance between government and business as critical to good economic
performance and social harmony. In this model, the economy needs a state that
eagerly lends an ear to business, and, when necessary, greases the wheels of
commerce by providing incentives, subsidies, and other discretionary benefits.
Because investment and job creation ensure economic prosperity, the objective of
government policy should be to make producers happy. Rigid rules and distant
policymakers merely suffocate the animal spirits of the business class.

This view reflects an even older tradition that goes back to the mercantilist
practices of the seventeenth century. Mercantilists believed in an active economic
role for the state – to promote exports, discourage finished imports, and establish
trade monopolies that would enrich business and the crown alike. This idea
survives today in the practices of Asian export superpowers (most notably China).

Adam Smith and his followers decisively won the intellectual battle between these
two models of capitalism. But the facts on the ground tell a more ambiguous story.

The growth champions of the past few decades – Japan in the 1950’s and 1960’s,
South Korea from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, and China since the early 1980’s –
have all had activist governments collaborating closely with large business. All
aggressively promoted investment and exports while discouraging (or remaining
agnostic about) imports. China’s pursuit of a high-saving, large-trade-surplus
economy in recent years embodies mercantilist teachings.

Early mercantilism deserves a rethink too. It is doubtful that the great expansion
of intercontinental trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have
been possible without the incentives that states provided, such as monopoly
charters. As many economic historians argue, the trade networks and profits that
mercantilism provided for Britain may have been critical in launching the
country’s industrial revolution around the middle of the eighteenth century.

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Mercantilism Reconsidered by Dani Rodrik - Project Syndicate 07/11/2016, 13*25

None of this is to idealize mercantilist practices, whose harmful effects are easy to
see. Governments can too easily end up in the pockets of business, resulting in
cronyism and rent-seeking instead of economic growth.

Even when initially successful, government intervention in favor of business can

outlive its usefulness and become ossified. The pursuit of trade surpluses
inevitably triggers conflicts with trade partners, and the effectiveness of
mercantilist policies depends in part on the absence of similar policies elsewhere.

Moreover, unilateral mercantilism is no guarantee of success. The Chinese-US

trade relationship may have seemed like a marriage made in heaven – between
practitioners of the mercantilist and liberal models, respectively – but in hindsight
it is clear that it merely led to a blowup. As a result, China will have to make
important changes to its economic strategy, a necessity for which it has yet to
prepare itself.

Nonetheless, the mercantilist mindset provides policymakers with some important

advantages: better feedback about the constraints and opportunities that private
economic activity faces, and the ability to create a sense of national purpose
around economic goals. There is much that liberals can learn from it.

Indeed, the inability to see the advantages of close state-business relations is the
blind spot of modern economic liberalism. Just look at how the search for the
causes of the financial crisis has played out in the US. Current conventional
wisdom places the blame squarely on the close ties that developed between
policymakers and the financial industry in recent decades. For textbook liberals,
the state should have kept its distance, acting purely as Platonic guardians of
consumer sovereignty.

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But the problem is not that government listened too much to Wall Street; rather,

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Mercantilism Reconsidered by Dani Rodrik - Project Syndicate 07/11/2016, 13*25

the problem is that it didn’t listen enough to Main Street, where the real producers
and innovators were. That is how untested economic theories about efficient
markets and self-regulation could substitute for common sense, enabling financial
interests to gain hegemony, while leaving everyone else, including governments,
to pick up the pieces.

Read more from our "The Clash of the Capitalisms" Focal Point.

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