| The costs of import substitution (IS) as a strategy for industrialization, which was deemed synonymous with economic development by many development economists of the fifties and sixties, were shown to be substantial in the influential and nuanced studies of the seventies and eighties under the auspices of OECD, NBER and World Bank. These studies played a critical role in shifting policies in several developing countries away from the IS strategy. Recently there has been a proliferation of cross country regressions as a methodology of analysis of issues relating to growth, trade and other issues. Both proponents (e.g. Sachs and Warner (1995)) and opponents (Rodriguez and Rodrik (1999)) of the view that openness to trade is linked to higher growth have... |
