Unlearning the lessons of East Asia’s economic miracle

As Peter Drysdale and Rojan Joshi write in this week’s lead article, ‘security-driven economic policy in industrial countries’ has seen ‘an explosion of trade interventions, industrial policies and subsidies, exacerbating the threat to the world economy posed by the widespread derogation from the global trade rules’.

They argue that ‘developing economies, constrained by their fiscal capacity, should recall the waste and futility of past industrial policies that picked industry champions rather than creating…