多国籍企業研究第11号

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7How MNEs Help Mobilize Rural Labor for Industrialization, Alleviating Poverty (as have done across East Asia):Is the “America First” Policy a Threat?Terutomo Ozawaacceptable level each time.13 Besides, if all the economies involved pushed exports simultaneously, those already low-priced exports from catch-up beginners would drive down their prices even more under the pressure of oversupply. This nullifies the effectiveness of such a takeoff strategy. In other words, the so-called “fallacy of composition” was avoided. Furthermore, staggering makes it easier--increasingly each time--for the subsequent rounds of takeoff due to accumulating opportunities to learn from the experiences of those previous rounds. For example, China’s takeoff must have been expedited by learning from the experiences of the three earlier rounds (involving Japan, the NIEs, and the ASEAN-4), since it was in a much more favorable position than those already taken-off neighbors to benefit from the increased supply of knowledge/technology needed to execute a successful takeoff. This is an important source of sequential latecomers’ advantage down the hierarchy of economies, what I call “the economies of late-learning from neighbors’ successive earlier experiences,” namely, FG-driven positive externalities. 4．China as Africa’s new leader? The successful flying-geese formation in East Asia is the very reason why in 2009, sensing the rising Chinese wages that would soon compel MNEs to move factories to new low-cost locations, the World Bank called upon China to make investments not just in resource exploitation and infrastructure development but also more in low-cost manufacturing to spark an industrial takeoff in sub-Saharan Africa,14 a region that badly needs employment opportunities for its vast masses of poor people, who ought to be mobilized for productive work as the main driver of an export-driven takeoff. True, China has already emerged as the most significant investor in the region, especially in manufacturing in such host countries as Ethiopia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia. Yet, the prospects for sub-Saharan Africa’s industrial takeoff led by Chinese manufacturing investment are still unpromising due largely to local political instability and the availability of alternative new factory locations in China’s own vast inland and neighboring countries.15 Be that as it may, the World Bank recognizes the crucial role of labor-intensive industries as the most effective initiator of emerging markets’ industrialization and poverty reduction and the role of MNEs as the most powerful agent to tap the huge reservoir of unused human resources in the emerging economies (the two crucial points stressed above). Indeed, India that began a rapid catch-up by initially jumping into the modern information and communications industry via call centers and back-office services soon realized̶having learned from China’s catch-up in particular-13 This point is hinted in Balassa (1989): “The stages approach to comparative advantage... permits one to dispel certain misapprehensions as regard the foreign demand constraint for manufactured exports... With countries progressing on the comparative advantage scale, their exports can supplant the exports of countries that graduate to a higher level” (p. 28). 14 This was widely reported in the news media. See, inter alia, “China and World Bank in Talks to Establish Industrial Zones in Africa,” Financial Times, December 4, 2009.15 Ozawa and Bellak (2010). For an expanded, updated version, see Chapter 6 in Ozawa (2016).