ABSTRACT

The debate around the Corn Laws calls the attention to one important stylized fact in the history of economic policy: All presently industrialized countries have, in the early stages of industrialization-from fifteenth-century England to twentieth-century Japan and Korea-been through a period where economic policy was heavily discriminatory against raw material production, and/or heavily favouring manufacturing. The particular mix of anti-raw materialism and pro-manufacturing policies varied, depending on the special circumstances of each nation.