(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Laughable Indictment of Trump’s World Bank Choice

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David Malpass, economic development, Financial Times, globalism, multilateralism, third world, Trump, World Bank, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I was going to post this morning on more implications of yesterday’s new monthly U.S. trade figures, but as so often happens, the Mainstream Media has just come out with an article whose mind-boggling cluelessness reveals such deep-seated biases that I had to switch gears. Special bonus – it didn’t even come from a mainstay of the establishmentarian U.S. foreign policy and globalization Blob. Instead, we have the Financial Times editorial board to thank.

What other conclusion can be reasonably drawn from the FT editorial slamming President Trump’s appointment of David Malpass to head the World Bank?

Not that Malpass has been God’s Gift to Economics or to the cause of third world economic development. But according to the FT, a big problem with Malpass is that he lacks the leadership experience as well as intellectual and often political heft of previous U.S. choices like – wait for it – Robert S. McNamara.

That’s right – the same Robert McNamara who deserves such blame for the American disaster in Vietnam. What’s next for the FT? Criticizing Mr. Trump for appointing a senior military adviser lacking the battlefield genius of George Armstrong Custer?

Almost as bad: What’s given the FT editorialists the idea that McNamara, or any of his pre-Malpass successors, was such a whiz at the Bank? Here’s an appraisal of McNamara’s tenure arguing that he unintentionally created “incentives for Bank staff and management to push money out the door, sometimes with relatively little regard for how it would be used—a practice that still bedevils the Bank’s work today.” And this was from an admirer.

A second major FT argument against Malpass looks more reasonable at first glance:

“His judgment even on economics, his supposed speciality, is wanting. Notoriously, as then chief economist at Bear Stearns, Mr Malpass was blithely confident about the strength of the US economy in 2007 — a year before the global financial crisis hit and his own employer went under.”

What the FT conveniently forgets, though, is that using this standard would rule out virtually every economist in the world as World Bank president.  

Considerably stronger is the FT‘s observation that “As early as 2011 [Malpass] suggested tightening monetary policy and driving up the dollar, a hard-money philosophy entirely at odds with the reality that the Fed had averted economic disaster.”

The problem with this school of thought is that, although the Federal Reserve’s flooding of the American economy with easy money may have been necessary to keep the nation (and world) afloat, it’s also arguably created a global addiction to super-cheap credit that’s kneecapped chances of restoring genuine long-run economic health.

As contended by no less an economic authority than Lawrence Summers (a former World Bank research chief), the result has been “secular stagnation” – the inability of the United States or other major countries to grow acceptably without inflating lending and spending bubbles that are doomed to burst disastrously.

As the editorial makes clear, the FT mainly objects to Malpass because he’s “deeply sceptical of multilateral institutions.” Which would be funny even if the FT itself didn’t describe the Bank as already “dysfunctional” – despite being led by McNamara and all his supposedly genius successors.

More fundamentally, all else equal, why should anyone lack skepticism about any means to an end? Worshiping multilateralism is like worshiping a hammer. Sometimes is the best tool to use; sometimes it’s not.

The FT reasonably argues that “With an increasing number of rival sources of development finance — not to mention private capital — the bank needs to think hard about where it can best add value.” The paper just as reasonably concludes that effecting change requires its president “to be a critical friend of multilateralism who recognises that its institutions need to be adapted to a changing world, not an instinctive ideological enemy.”

But given that these – and other – problems with the Bank have persisted for so long, it’s hard to imagine that a leader accepted by multilateral fetishists like the FT would generate the necessary push.

As a result, the Malpass nomination can just as reasonably be viewed as a Trump administration attempt to change the kind of losing game coddled for so long by diehard multilateralists like the FT editorial board. Such critics should exhibit a little more humility before writing him off as a sure failure. Not to mention minimal historical memory. 

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: U.S. Trade Policy Deserves Blame for the Caravans

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apparel, asylum seekers, Bangladesh, CAFTA, caravan, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Central America, Central America Free Trade Agreement, China, economic development, El Salvador, globalization, Guatemala, Honduras, immigrants, Immigration, manufacturing, migrants, Multi-Fibre Arrangement, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Northern Triangle, Trade, Uruguay Round, Vietnam, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Hot on the heels of the current caravan of Central Americans heading through Mexico to the U.S. border, another such procession is gathering in Guatemala. And these two have followed the flood of unaccompanied migrant children from the area that reached the United States in 2014.

I wish I could tell you that there’s a silver bullet for solving the problem – though nothing could be clearer than that these human tides will keep organizing in even greater numbers if Washington follows the general advice of the Open Borders lobby to view all of the caravan-ers as legitimate asylum-seekers entitled to full due process once they reach the border and request this status. Upon which time current procedures call for recording their claims and then releasing them based on the ludicrous assumption that they’ll report back to immigration court on the appointed date and risk being rejected and thus deported.

What I can tell you is that this crisis has been greatly aggravated by an unforgivably short-sighted U.S. trade policy strategy that emerged in the 1990s. It consisted of indiscriminately liberalizing trade with developing countries, and thereby ignoring the case for targeting trade diplomacy to ensure that countries and regions of greatest importance to the United States receive the lion’s share of the benefits. And the prime victims of this strategic failure – which mainly reflected the determination of offshoring multinational manufacturers and Big Box retailers to gain maximum flexibility to source imported inputs and final products – were the poorer countries of the Western Hemisphere. That group of course includes Mexico and the Central American countries that have sent so many migrants northward.

Interestingly, Central America and the Caribbean countries were placed prominently in line to receive significant shares of the vast U.S. market by a Reagan-era initiative aimed mainly at stemming the spread of left-wing revolutionary forces in the region. But scant years later, any hopes generated by this strategy for fostering more prosperity in these impoverished regions and strengthening the appeal of pro-Western leaders were kneecapped by two big decisions.

The first was the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. The second was the phase out of U.S. and other developed countries’ quotas on apparel imports that was approved the following year as part of the Uruguay Round global agreement that reduced various trade barriers worldwide and created the World Trade Organization (WTO). And the third was the Clinton administration’s subsequent rush to liberalize trade with a host of low-income countries outside the Western Hemisphere.

In principle NAFTA’s tight focus on Mexico was justifiable given Mexico’s size, position as a U.S. neighbor, and history of political, economic, and social policy failure that seemed to be reaching a crisis point. But economic growth and employment could still have been greatly lifted in Mexico and Central American (along with the Caribbean countries) had American trade liberalization stopped or at least paused there.

Yet the quota phaseout forbade Washington from incorporating any strategic or non-economic considerations into apparel trade policy, whether conditions urgently required them or not.  As a result, it ensured that the benefits of freer trade would be greatly watered down (and many garnered by China and the rest of developing Asia in particular), and insult was added to injury by new liberalization deals reached or renewed, or decisions made, regarding Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, Jordan, most of developing Asia (in the form of a deal on information technology products, including labor-intensive consumer electronics), and China. Largely as a result, the poorer countries of the Western Hemisphere were left in the dust in the business models of the multinationals and the big retailers.

Nowhere does the opportunity lost by Mexico and Central America come through more clearly than in the apparel trade figures. This sector is almost always the first utilized by developing countries to begin their industrialization and modernization drives mainly because its own labor intensivity means that capital and technology requirements are pretty modest, the relevant skills can be taught fairly easily, and its job-creation promise is substantial.

Here are the figures for apparel imports from Mexico, the three “Northern Triangle” Central American countries, China, and two other current Asian textile giants (Bangladesh and Vietnam) for four key years. Next to them will be the figure for the share of American apparel consumption (market share) won at that point by each. We start with 1997 because that’s the year when the U.S. government began adopting its current dominant system for slicing and dicing trade and manufacturing data – which enables us to see statistics that are apples-to-apples. The second year is 2001 – the year China’s was admitted into the WTO – and thus gained substantial immunity from American laws aimed at curbing predatory trade practices. The third year is 2006 – when Congress approved a Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiate by George W. Bush’s administration. And the fourth year is last year – the latest for which we have full-year numbers.

1997

Mexico:                       $5.317b                    11.29 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.052b                     2.18 percent

Guatemala:                  $0.973b                     2.07 percent

Honduras:                    $1.689b                     3.59 percent

China:                          $7.279b                   15.46 percent

Bangladesh:                 $1.442b                      3.06 percent

Vietnam:                      $0.026b                      0.06 percent

2001:

Mexico:                       $8.112b                     12.99 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.634b                      2.62 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.630b                       2.61 percent

Honduras:                    $2.438b                       3.91 percent

China:                          $8.597b                     13.47 percent

Bangladesh:                 $2.101b                      3.37 percent

Vietnam:                      $0.048b                       0.08 percent

2006:

Mexico:                       $5.514b                       7.16 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.408b                      1.83 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.685b                      2.19 percent

Honduras:                    $2.519b                      3.27 percent

China:                        $22.405b                    22.09 percent

Bangladesh:                 $2.915b                       3.79 percent

Vietnam:                      $3.226b                       4.19 percent

2017:

Mexico:                       $3.806b                       4.52 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.920b                       2.28 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.371b                       1.63 percent

Honduras:                    $2.522b                       3.00 percent

China:                        $29.322b                     34.85 percent

Bangladesh:                $5.046b                       6.00 percent

Vietnam:                    $11.613b                     13.80 percent

The big takeaway? Even during the decade after the Central America free trade deal was signed, the three Northern Triangle countries actually saw their share of the U.S. apparel market stagnate or actually shrink. Mexico’s share has been cut by about almost 60 percent. And the business won by China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam has exploded – since 2001 for China, and since 2006 for the two other Asians. Again, the year that the free trade deal that was supposed to benefit El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras was inked.

With Mexico, there are of course mitigating factors. Chiefly, although its apparel competitiveness in the U.S. market is way down, its competitiveness in higher value automotive manufacturing in particular is way up. But millions of poor Mexicans still could have benefited from apparel employment, and no such progress has been made in Central America – which is partly understandable since incomes are even lower, and governments and other institutions needed for economic development are so much weaker.

Apparel should have been the great hope for these populations, but that sector’s potential for expanding production (which of course needs to be export-oriented since these countries’ domestic markets are tiny) and employment has been virtually choked off. Just as important, the prospect that apparel wages in the Northern Triangle might rise adequately has been limited, too – since pay throughout developing East and South Asia (even in China, according to the chart below) remains so much lower.

American trade policy could have lent a big helping hand to Central America had it adopted a strategically sensible set of priorities. But it failed to learn a fundamental lesson of strategy: When everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. You can see the victims of this failure in the flow of human misery heading up from the Northern Triangle.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Washington’s Africa Sloppiness Shows Dangers of Fast Tracking Trade

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Africa, African Growth and Opportunity Act, AGOA, Congress, economic development, fast track, garments, manufacturing, MFA, Multifibre Arrangement, TPA, TPP, Trade, Trade Promotion Authority, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Uruguay Round, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Renewal of America’s trade agreement with sub-Saharan Africa isn’t the single biggest determinant of the fate of fast track authority in Congress this week, but it’s certainly in the mix. And the enormous popularity it’s enjoyed even among lawmakers generally opposed to current trade policies speaks volumes about how sloppily Washington as a whole develops trade agreements, and how the results can fail even intended foreign beneficiaries.

The Africa trade deal – created by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) – is intended to promote economic progress on the continent by opening the U.S. market wide to its exports. Even though African countries aren’t required to reciprocate, the measure seems worthwhile, as the continent’s own purchasing power is meager at best, and its non-oil sales to the United States are miniscule as well.

But since AGOA went into effect in 2001, even supporters in academe, like Harvard University economist Robert Z. Lawrence have called its growth-inducing effects in Africa “quite disappointing.” And the reasons stem from two major and related U.S. trade policy mistakes that could be easily corrected, but that remain in effect mainly because Washington has cared much more about pretending to help the continent rather than seriously addressing its problems.

The first fatal flaw has to do with AGOA’s “rule of origin” provisions, which principally affect the African apparel production and shipments. Developing strong apparel industries is crucial to the development hopes of the AGOA countries, because as a labor-intensive manufacturing sector, clothing historically has served as a “starter” industry for developing nations seeking both higher growth and higher incomes. And the hope clearly was that, once competitive local garment manufacturing had been established, sub-Saharan Africa would be able to attract the kind of investment needed to move to from relatively simple assembly to the next stage up the industrialization ladder – fabric and other input production.

Indeed, the current lack of meaningful fabric or yarn manufacturing in most of the AGOA countries to begin with led Washington to permit them to export on a duty-free basis to the United States garments made largely of foreign-produced fabric – both from the United States and from third countries. In its first few years, AGOA did stimulate strongly growing African apparel shipments to the United States. But progress came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the last decade, The quality failed to improve – in particular, AGOA fostered almost no fabric production – because most of the non-U.S. providers of fabric for African-assembled garments showed almost no interest in its encouragement. So AGOA apparel sales to Americans still largely consist of fabric produced outside Africa, generally in Asia – including China. Consequently, Africans have remained stuck in knitting and sewing work, which adds relatively little value to their economies.

But even the growth of shipments from Africa to the United States has slowed, and that owes to Washington’s second major trade policy mistake – its insistence that a global system of quotas for third world apparel exports be abolished as part of the Uruguay Round world trade liberalization agreement. As I wrote in this 2013 article, this Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) was widely criticized as selfish protectionism on the part of the high income countries that used it to regulate foreign market access for textiles and clothing. But it also gave invaluable opportunities to the world’s least developed countries to establish niches – and indeed growing niches – in this business, mainly by limiting imports from more advanced developing countries, like Taiwan, Korea, China, and even India.

And since AGOA’s provisions remain largely unchanged, most of its economic development benefits will continue flowing to countries that need them much less. And in a final, especially cruel, irony, avowed friends of Africa who vote for President Obama’s proposed Pacific Rim trade deal will only wind up putting added pressure on the continent. For one of the biggest expected results of this Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will be to supercharge U.S. apparel imports from hyper-competitive – and super low-wage and anti-union – Vietnam.

So if Congress – and the Obama administration – really wanted to help sub-Saharan Africa, they would push the World Trade Organization to restore the MFA or at least reestablish a quota system of its own, and they would rethink the TPP. That neither proposal is on the table in Washington strongly indicates that, when it comes to using U.S. trade policy to aiding developing countries, American leaders are much more interested in feeling good than in doing good. And can the same president and legislators who have so thoroughly neglected crucial AGOA-related details really be reasonably expected to produce a TPP that benefits America?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Flawed Basis for “Over-Priced” China Hopes

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advanced manufacturing, Boston Consulting Group, China, developing countries, economic development, labor, labor-intensive manufacturing, Lewis Point, manufacturing, manufacturing renaissance, Obama, productivity, W. Arthur Lewis, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Quick – how many of you have heard of the Lewis point? Not a clue? Don’t worry – you’re not alone. Even most supposedly serious economic analysts seem unacquainted with it. At the same time, it’s difficult to talk realistically about patterns of Chinese and U.S. industrial competitiveness without keeping it in mind, along with its significant weaknesses, and the release of a new report about China’s labor force is a great occasion to examine its significance.

The Lewis point – named after the prominent development economist Sir W. Arthur Lewis – is the hypothetical stage of a country’s economic evolution at which its supply of excess labor shrinks enough to start pushing wages up. As a result, it’s the dominant theory in economics explaining how low-income third world countries with major labor surpluses nowadays can plausibly hope to become much higher income countries.

I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of the Lewis notion, mainly because the labor surpluses in developing countries have been so vast, and incomes so incredibly low. Indeed, my book The Race to the Bottom cited third world labor gluts as features of the global economy with such staying power that they would be instrumental in ensuring that world trade flows would long remain lopsided to the detriment of workers in developed countries, and global financial stability.

More recently, the Lewis point has shaped much recent thinking about global manufacturing’s future, and especially about the outlook for the United States and China – even though few of these thinkers have mentioned Lewis’ ideas. In particular, U.S. manufacturing cheerleaders like President Obama and the Boston Consulting Group have predicted that lots of industrial activity will move from China to the United States largely because labor shortages there are already driving wages too high to justify its current levels of production. In other words, the Lewis theory looks like it’s playing out right now in the PRC.

As I’ve written exhaustively, these claims of rising Chinese wages are full of serious problems. (The new China labor report claims to have spotted another one.) One rising-China-wages problem I haven’t discussed, however, stems from a big flaw in the Lewis point theory that would weaken it even if one could document the kinds of Lewis-ian wage hikes that the cheerleaders claim to be seeing. Lewis’ ideas arguably make sense outside sectors of an economy exposed to international trade, like services. But since trade is crucial to developing countries’ growth – because, by definition their domestic markets lack the wealth needed to create anything like the employment opportunities they need – relevance to trade should make or break the Lewish theorem. And here’s why it doesn’t seem able to hold long enough to matter.

In developing countries making their way in a world with robust trade – and full of surplus labor – overly generous pay in the labor-intensive industries in which economic development naturally starts will indeed reduce the competitiveness of their manufacturing. But events don’t then simply come to a screeching halt. One of three manufacturing-related developments – or some combination of them – can be expected next, at least if the rest of economics has any validity. (Of course, as with all economics theorizing, these scenarios depend at least in part on other factors holding more or less constant.)

Possibility one is that so much competitiveness is lost that jobs in those globally exposed sectors dry up, surplus labor starts to emerge once more, and wages start sagging again. Possibility two is that employers do what they do everywhere else in the world to cope with scarce labor – they automate, or become more efficient in other ways, and either replace labor with capital and technology, or raise their productivity, or do both. And possibility three is that these countries use capital and technology to move into more advanced industries.

China specifically seems to be climbing the technology ladder quite rapidly, as evidenced by its production of ever more advanced manufactures. But the nation still hosts a large labor-intensive manufacturing sector, and its struggles appear to be in part behind China’s growth slowdown.

It’s true that, in principle, because low-income countries are poor, their businesses might lack the access to capital and technology to take these steps. In practice, though, many foreign investors have been happy to help out, and many third world governments (notably in Asia) access the capital from their own populations through economic policies that promote saving and discourage consumption. Intellectual property theft, or forced technology transfers, have aided many (mainly Asian) countries, too.

It’s also true that not all national business establishments in globally exposed sectors will be smart enough to make these adjustments, or fast enough to re-attract from more promising sectors whatever workers they need. But at least some will, and they’ll become the new manufacturing winners until others start coping as or more successfully, or come up with superior alternative approaches.

Incidentally, these Lewis point shortcomings also explain why hopes for significant wage increases in U.S.-based manufacturing (which, to their credit, the manufacturing cheerleaders like President Obama have not predicted) appear misplaced. Although it’s difficult to know the tipping points in various manufacturing sectors, no one can reasonably doubt that they exist. If they’re ever passed strongly enough and long enough (a development that looks pretty far-fetched for now), offshoring to much lower wage countries will start looking just as attractive as in the past. Moreover, as made clear by China’s inroads into advanced manufacturing, the productivity gains that will be needed to offset these wage increases will need to be genuinely historic – a sobering thought at a time when manufacturing’s productivity growth has been slowing.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: And if Asians Aren’t Too Smart to Wage War?

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Asia, China, deterrence, economic development, escalation dominance, Kishore Mahbubani, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, rising power, U.S. forward deployments

Former Singaporean diplomat and now leading intellectual Kishore Mahbubani has made something of a career of tweaking Westerners for what he sees as often condescending and culturally blinkered views of Asia, and often he’s right. Just as often, however, he suffers attacks of simple Asian chauvinism, and a typical case in point is his new Financial Times essay on why his native region has defied numerous predictions and avoided major war over the past year.

As Mahbubani notes, many prominent (non-Asian) analysts looked at China’s increased Asia-Pacific muscle-flexing in particular and feared that Beijing was both on a collision course with its neighbors, and behaving as a classic rising power whose ambitions would soon clash with major interests of the established United States. And as he also notes, the worst of these dangers have so far been avoided.

According to Mahbubani, these predictions have proven wrong so far – and his own optimism proven right, because Westerners ignored “the Asian dynamic.” As he explains, for all their periodic bluster, Asians simply are too smart to fight each other. They know that conflict would threaten the spectacular economic development that’s been their overriding policy priority.

If Mahbubani is right, that would of course indicate a very steep learning curve for a region with no modern history of prolonged peace until very recently. And maybe economic success will do that. But Mahbubani seems to be missing a huge piece of the picture: the U.S. military presence in Asia.

As I’ve written recently, the Mahbubani thesis may be getting a test before too long, for ominous signs are appearing that, for all its strength, the United States may soon lose unquestioned escalation dominance in the region. The continual strengthening of Chinese and North Korean nuclear forces is undermining Washington’s basis for assuming that the American homeland would come away unscathed in any confrontation with these countries.  Therefore, the deterrent effects of U.S. forward deployments could be weakening.

If escalation dominance is indeed getting less dominant, the recent Pax Asiana could be threatened by an American decision to withdraw from the region, in the (quite understandable) belief that saving Seoul or Tokyo (or Singapore) isn’t worth risking Los Angeles or New York. But Asia’s current tranquility could also come to a sudden end even if American forces remain. All it would take is the a challenger’s confidence, justified or not, that Washington would blink in a showdown.

“As 2015 unfolds,” Mahbubani concluded smugly, “I would like to encourage all western pundits to understand the underlying Asian dynamic on its own terms, and not on the basis of western preconceptions.” He also might consider thanking his lucky stars that, so far, American military forces have made sure that Asians have not had to rely on their own supposed brilliance alone for the peace and security they enjoy.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Overseas Deflation Threats Over the Horizon

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deflation, economic development, exports, Global Imbalances, globalization, India, Indonesia, industrialization, manufacturing, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Whoever the winners in the midterm elections in the United States, their top challenge would have been the same: strengthening the U.S. recovery and extending its benefits to the vast majority of Americans who have seen their incomes fall even as growth has resumed. One of the main obstacles would have remained the same, too: unusually weak growth in wages and prices, which keeps signaling that the economy’s paramount source of growth – the demand for goods and services – is likely to remain weak, too.

More alarming, the wage and price stagnation could well turn into deflation – a situation of falling wages and prices that tends to worsen and plunge growth itself into a nosedive. Consumers put off purchases in the expectation of better bargains, businesses therefore sell less and less, they hire fewer and fewer (if at all), wages sink further, and a race to the bottom is on.

Deflation of course will need to be fought on the home front. But its deep rooted international roots will need to addressed as well, in particular the impact of literally hundreds of millions of workers from gigantic but very poor developing countries who began flooding world labor markets at the beginning of the 1990s whose capacity to produce was orders of magnitude greater than their capacity to consume.

It’s now become a commonplace that what I once called this worldwide worker explosion – epitomized by the rise of China – has undermined pricing power throughout the world economy, and especially in segments whose output could be readily traded, like manufacturing. Less commonplace, but just as important, is that the persistence and even strengthening of deflation since means that the uber-prediction advanced to sell expanded trade with these countries has so far proven completely bogus. At least in a relative sense, consuming power in the developing world hasn’t grown nearly fast enough to rebalance supply and demand.

In recent weeks, however, some news has emerged indicating that deflationary forces are about to get stronger still. I’m not talking about the worsening of economic stagnation in the European Union – the world’s largest single economic unit. I’m talking about the renewed determination of two other third world population giants – India and Indonesia – to become major manufacturing powers along the lines of China.

I’m actually surprised that it’s taken them this long. But contrary to my expectation – as expressed in my book The Race to the Bottom – Indonesia focused on exploiting its oil and other natural resources. India’s industrialization has famously been slowed by the dreadful state of its infrastructure and its choking bureaucratic red tape and, paradoxically, by its success in computer software and high tech services.

Both countries recently elected new leaders, and both of them have decided that promoting manufacturing can fill crucial national gaps and promote crucial national needs. India has concluded that even the most advanced services sector offers no hope of providing decent employment for the vast majority of its people living on subsistence wages – at best. Indonesia believes that it will never approach first world levels of prosperity by continuing to rely on commodity production.

Unquestionably, industrialization remains the best long term bet for meaningful third world economic progress. Over the shorter term, though – if it works – it could inject a huge new deflationary shock into a world economy at exactly the wrong time.

Consider some of these figures. Indonesia’s population is 250 million. Even after an excellent, commodity-led growth run over the last few years, only 13 million households have annual disposable incomes greater than $10,000. In large measure, the explanation is that, as one analyst puts it, “Compared with other countries in Asia Pacific, Indonesia…has the most attractive hourly wage.” Meaning of course, the lowest wage. India has 1.25 billion people. Its average hourly manufacturing labor cost of 92 cents is just over one-fourth of China’s.

Of course both countries are hoping – and need – to serve export markets, especially in higher income countries, where the world’s critical mass of purchasing power is still found. But both are also hoping to supply their own internal markets from within. So export opportunities for U.S. and other workers from the developed world could be even less lucrative than suggested by these two countries’ low living standards.

As a result, their big-time entry into global manufacturing markets stands to bring not only deflation, but greater international imbalances like those that triggered the financial crisis six years ago. Figuring out how to harmonize worthy and entirely legitimate third world hopes for progress and prosperity on the one hand, and the global financial stability that benefits everyone on the other, is the greatest international economic policy challenge of our time. Is there any reason to think it’s even close to the screen of either the Obama administration or Republican leaders in Congress?