…a bit like planting seeds ahead of the season, such tariffs end up diverting citizens’ scarce resources into the pockets of “foresighted” entrepreneurs like Chief Festus, whose only claim to managerial savvy is that they either receive subsidies from government under the pretext of a national industrial policy, or have been protected from useful competition…
Yet, as Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew could have told us so many years ago, foreign investment in an economy, and the competition provided by an open economy, are possibly the two most important stimuli for economic development. Part of the benefits of this is from the additional capital that comes in. Some of it is from new management practices. Another part from new technology. And some from lower prices.
Whereas government has committed to bringing down the domestic cost of doing business, including through the reduction of the number of processes and government institutions that would-be entrepreneurs have to go through to set up shop, it has struggled to fix the infrastructure dearth, to get our schools and healthcare facilities working, to eliminate the lets on interstate commerce, or to reform the bureaucracy. And so, as it was in the beginning , so it still is towards the end.