Wednesday, September 23, 2009

World War II & Protectionism

I'm a big fan of World War II history and usually read a book on the subject over the summer. I'm midway through the "The Wages of Destruction" by Adam Tooze.

On a different take than most WWII books, the author tries to view the conflict through an economics point of view. Something that drew my attention is how the Great Depression had a significant impact on international affairs during the 30s. In particular, I found incredible how the protectionist measures taken by individual countries (i.e. the usual "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies) ended up making life much more difficult to people in terms of reducing international trade and having domestic production of clearly inefficient goods.

I wish that leaders from the G20 take up the opportunity and give the Doha Round on multilateral trade another go.

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