Can Globalization Still Deliver? : The Challenge of Convergence in the 21st Century

This paper explores how poor countries might take advantage of globalization to raise their living standards and converge toward the advanced economies. The poor country, which has cheap labor and inadequate capital, acquires the superior technology that the rich country has. With everyone rationally expecting greater things in the poor country, investment there takes off. People in the rich country save more to invest and take advantage of the new higher returns in the poor country. The poor country runs a substantial current account deficit and imports needed capital that the rich country happily, and profitably, provides. The developing countries showed limited willingness and capacity to open up to competition. They had only a limited ability to attract foreign investment. The IMF ended up studying why some members failed to progress despite prolonged use of IMF resources. The Philippines, for example, had about 20 nearly consecutive IMF lending programs