Ha-Joon Chang (b.
South Korea in 1963) is one of the world's foremost
heterodox economists specialising in
development economics. Trained at the
University of Cambridge, where he currently works as a Reader in the Political Economy of Development, Chang is the author of several influential policy books, including 2002's
Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective.
He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Investment Bank as well as to Oxfam and various United Nations agencies. He is also a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
Chang is also famous for being one of the crucial academic influences on the economist Rafael Correa, currently President of Ecuador.
Background
Chang´s contribution to heterodox economics started while studying under
Robert Rowthorn, a leading British
Marxist economist, with whom he worked on the elaboration of the theory of
industrial policy, a middle-way between
central planning and the unrestrained
free-market. His work in this area led to the elaboration of a broader approach to economics Chang calls
institutionalist political economy which places economic history and socio-political factors at the centre of the evolution of economic practices.
Books
In his book
Kicking Away the Ladder (which won the 2003
Gunnar Myrdal Prize), Chang argued that all major
developed countries used interventionist economic policies in order to get rich and then tried to forbid other countries from doing similarly. The
WTO,
World Bank and
IMF come in for strong criticism for this kind of ladder-kicking which is, according to Chang, the fundamental obstacle to poverty alleviation in the developing world. This and other work led to his being awarded the 2005
Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought from the
Global Development and Environment Institute (previous prize-winners include
Amartya Sen,
John Kenneth Galbraith and
Herman Daly).
Following up on the ideas of Kicking Away the Ladder, Chang published Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World in December 2007.. Chang argues that unregulated international trade (free markets) has very rarely succeeded in producing economic development, and has a far worse record compared to interventionist policies. He cites evidence that GDP growth in developing countries was higher prior to external pressures recommending deregulation and extends his analysis of the failures of free trade to induce growth through privatisation and anti-inflationary policies. The book is sometimes confused with an earlier book criticising unregulated free trade Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt (1990) by the development activist Paul Vallely which is a political rather than economic critique. Chang's book won plaudits from Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
References
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