In recent years, “free trade” has become an end in itself, often without regard to the economic and social consequences of the indiscriminate removal of trade barriers or even international investment flows. But the current world economic recession, along with the failure of the Doha round of WTO negotiations, has spurred some re-thinking of these issues among economists and policy makers.
In his book, Bad Samaritans, Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang argues that, by recommending to (or even forcing upon) developing countries the free-trade, free market policies that they themselves never used when they were developing the rich countries that have reached the top are 'kicking away the ladder' to wealth that they themselves climbed.
