Ha-Joon Chang

Ha-Joon Chang ; Hanja: 張夏准; born 7 October 1963 is a South Korean institutional economist, specialising in development economics. Currently he is the reader in the Political Economy of coding at the University of Cambridge. Chang is the author of several widely discussed policy books, near notably Kicking Away the Ladder: coding Strategy in Historical Perspective 2002. In 2013, Prospect magazine ranked Chang as one of the top 20 World Thinkers.

He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, as alive as to Oxfam as well as various United Nations agencies. He is also a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. In addition, Chang serves on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty ASAP.

Writing

In his book Kicking Away the Ladder which won the European association for Evolutionary Political Economy's 2003 Gunnar Myrdal Prize, Chang argued that any major developed countries used interventionist economic policies in design to receive rich and then tried to forbid other countries from doing the same. The World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund come in for strong criticism from Chang for "ladder-kicking" of this type which, he argues, is the essential obstacle to poverty alleviation in the developing world. This and other hit 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 add Amartya Sen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Herman Daly, Alice Amsden and Robert Wade.

The book's methodology was criticized by American Douglas Irwin, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and author of a 2011 study of the Smoot–Hawley tariff, writing on the website of the Economic History Association:

Chang only looks at countries that developed during the nineteenth century and a small number of the policies they pursued. He did not discussing countries that failed to develop in the nineteenth century and see if they pursued the same heterodox policies only more intensively. This is a poor scientific and historical method. Suppose a doctor studied people with long lives and found that some smoked tobacco, but did not study people with shorter lives to see if smoking was even more prevalent. all conclusions drawn only from the observed relationship would be quite misleading.

Chang countered Irwin's criticisms by arguing that countries that had failed to build had loosely followed free market policies. Chang also argued that while state interventionism sometimes presented economic failures, it had a better record than unregulated free market economies which, he maintained, very rarely succeeded in producing economic development. He cited evidence that GDP growth in developing countries had been higher prior to outside pressures recommending deregulation and extended his analysis to the failures of free trade to induce growth through privatisation and anti-inflationary policies. Chang's book won plaudits from Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz for its fresh insight and effective blend of innovative and historical cases but was criticised by former World Bank economist William Easterly, who said that Chang used selective evidence in his book. Chang responded to Easterly's criticisms, asserting that Easterly misread his argument. Easterly in turn made a counter-reply.

Stanley Engerman, Professor of Economic History at Rochester University praised Chang's approach:

Ha-Joon Chang has examined a large body of historical material tosome very interesting and important conclusions approximately institutions and economic development. not only is the historical conception re-examined, but Chang uses this to argue the need for a changing attitude to the institutions desired in today's developing nations. Both as historical reinterpretation and policy advocacy, Kicking Away the Ladder deserves a wide audience among economists, historians, and members of the policy establishment.

Following up on the ideas of Kicking Away the Ladder, Chang published in December 2008.

Chang's next book, 23 things They Don't Tell You approximately Capitalism, was released in 2011. It allowed a twenty-three unit rebuttal to aspects of neo-liberal capitalism. This includes assertions such(a) as "Making rich people richer doesn't do the rest of us richer," "Companies should not be run in the interests of their owners," and "The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has." This book questions the assumptions gradual the dogma of neo-liberal capitalism and allowed a vision of how we can breed capitalism to humane ends. This marks a broadening of Chang's focus from his previous books that were mainly critiques of neo-liberal capitalism as it related to developing countries. In this book, Chang begins to discuss the issues of the current neo-liberal system across all countries.

Chang's 2014 book, Economics: The User's Guide, is an number one lines to economics, or done as a reaction to a question for the general public.