STING2 said:
Mexico's economy has continued to improve as trade barriers with the USA have been brought down. South Korea, Tawain, Singapore and some other Asian countries now are developed countries because of capitalism and free trade. 50 years ago they were poor agricultural based countries.
In general though, international trade has helped to modernize and devolop many former and current third world countries.
The eurocertrism in sting's comments is blatant. Oh! the west is the only reason the third world is even alive!
ok...lets do a little history here, since this is my degree.
why is there a third world in the first place?
ans: international trade.(albeit extreme)
do you think the third world just came about for no apparent reason? Do you think that the west was industrialised from some mysterious internal motor?
If you will look at the numbers, China, India, and all your other "backward" countires were all more "industrialized" than the west before 1750, Britain was actually quite pathetic in this regard. China was the greatest country for thousands of years. In our eurocentric schools they don't teach you that THEY were actually the first to create the printing press and that their economy was SOO much better than the wests'. So what happened after 1750 when the tables turned? The spanish, the porteguese, the English had just about reached their prime era in the matter of raping foriegn countries of their resources. The spanish pumped out God knows how much gold and silver from what would become Latin America. All that went to britain just about, and THAT was the fuel for the industrialisation. That and the opium trade of course, which had 110,000,000 chinese people addicted by the mid 19th century.
Conclusion: The third world is poor BECAUSE of our meddling. And we can thank them for out wealthy position.
And it just seems wrong that we CONTINUE to exploit these people who we have caused SOO much damage to.
they WOULD be better off if we had never ever gone over there. and they would probably be better off we would got the hell out of there now! If the world was a perfect place we would re-emberse them, taking inflation into account of course
But there are many factors which make that impossible.
The problem is, the west thinks that their path is the ONLY path to modernization and industrialization, whereas these countries ESPECIALLY china were well on their way before we fucked them up.
we have to stop imposing out view of the world on them.
Free trade WOULD be much better.