多国籍企業研究第11号

12/62

8How MNEs Help Mobilize Rural Labor for Industrialization, Alleviating Poverty (as have done across East Asia):Is the “America First” Policy a Threat?Terutomo Ozawa-the criticality of labor-intensive, basic manufacturing for poverty reduction. It started the “make-in-India” campaign to attract foreign MNEs that would be interested in abundantly available, low-wage labor in the country.5 ．Open up for MNEs’ investment in host countries and the job-offshoring backlash at home The strategy of MNE-assisted, export-driven takeoff has come to be widely adopted in the emerging world. It is different in many ways from, and more expeditious than, the old-style, Hamilton-List” infant-industry protection strategy.16 In this context, if an aspiring economy wants to industrialize, Harding and Javorcik (2012) put it succinctly, “Roll out the red carpet and they [MNEs] will come.” Indeed, this strategy has worked wonders for many emerging markets that properly had prepared themselves for opening (via export-processing or special economic zones) and welcoming foreign MNEs as partners to kick off industrialization. Clearly, the advanced countries’, especially the U.S.’s, willingness to keep their vast rich markets for imports from emerging markets was a necessary condition to accommodate the latter’s export-driven takeoff. The advanced world has been tolerating the ever-bulging imports from the emerging world on expectations that the latter’s growth would create more export markets for advanced economies. However, the flipside of MNE-enabled “comparative advantage magnification” in emerging host markets is necessarily “comparative disadvantage magnification” in the home countries. President Trump’s “America First” policy17 reflects a strong backlash against job offshoring and import outsourcing, which are relentlessly pursued by MNEs. His remark about the “carnage” means job losses, factory closures, and dilapidated communities̶that is, the sores of trade liberalization. At present, the only long-lasting measure to help globalization-afflicted workers and communities is the “trade adjustment assistance (TAA)” program (to subsidize worker retraining and community revival), which has nevertheless proved unsatisfactory, despite repeated tweaking over the past fifty years ever since its inception under the 1967 Trade Act. In this respect, it is true that “Tough talks will not bring back [old] jobs,” as recently argued by Martin Wolf (2017), a popular op-ed writer of The Financial Times. However, President Trump’s jawboning with the U.S. market as leverage--and a tariff threat (i.e., “If you sell in America, produce here--or else tariffs”) has already cajoled MNEs into pledging to retain current jobs and even create more new jobs in the U.S., the richest and most open market in the world. Besides, Wolf still considers the TAA program “the best response” to the ever-aggravating negative impact of job offshoring on the U.S. But his thinking contradicts the program’s actual poor results that contributed 16 For detail, see Chapter 3 in Ozawa (2016).17 According to the White House (2018), this policy means “putting the interests and security of the American people first.”