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10How MNEs Help Mobilize Rural Labor for Industrialization, Alleviating Poverty (as have done across East Asia):Is the “America First” Policy a Threat?Terutomo Ozawaconsiderable political resistance from the advanced countries as the former have started to nurture their own skill-based industries and national champions as competitors vis-à-vis foreign MNEs through state involvement. Besides, despite of their having already attained middle-income status, those successful emerging economies continue to retain and seek even more privileges by forming alliances with those still underdeveloped nations under multilateral trade deals. As a result, many advanced countries, especially the U.S., are calling for fair trade to correct the uneven playing field. Therefore, it is not the group of still-unindustrialized, lowest-income countries but the group of successfully taken-off, middle-income countries, especially BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and Mexico, that should be most worried about the Trump administration’s “America First” policy. In sum, so far as those low-income countries that are about to take off are concerned, the advanced world’s high-income markets for low-end manufactures should, and will, remain open, as analyzed above. There will still be opportunities continuously for labor-intensive basic manufacturing, in which the U.S. and other advanced countries are no longer interested--and which even China is willing to discard as its wages rise--to play the role of a powerful kick-starter for catch-up industrialization. In fact, when U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered North Korea “prosperity on the par with our South Korean friends” as a reward for denuclearization in May 2018, he must have had in his mind an export-driven, basic manufacturing to jumpstart economic modernization. REFERENCESAkamatsu, K. (1962) “A Historical Pattern of Economic Growth in Developing Countries,” Developing Economies, preliminary issue No.1 (March-August), 1-23.Balassa, B. (1989) Comparative Advantage, Trade Policy and Economic Development, New York: New York University Press.Economist (2018) “Poverty and migration: On their bikes,” Jan. 27.Harding, T and B. Javorcik (2012) “Roll out the red carpet and they will come: Investment promotion and FDI inflows,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, No.72 (June 18).Khokhar, T. (2016) “How Does Extreme Poverty Vary by Region?” The World Bank, the Data Blog. Oct. 11. Downloaded 2/19/2017.Kojima, K. (2000) “The ‘Flying-Geese’ Model of Asian Economic Development: Origin, Theoretical Extensions, and Regional Policy Implications,” Journal of Asian Economics, 11, 375-401.Kojima, K. and T. Ozawa (1984) “Micro- and Macro-Economic Models of Direct Foreign Investment: Toward a Synthesis,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, 25 (1), 1-20Krugman, P. (1994) “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle,” Foreign Affairs, 73 (6), 412-416.Krugman, P. (1997) “Whatever happened to the Asian Miracle?” Fortune, 136 (4), 26-29. Lewis, A. W. (1954) “Economic Development with unlimited supplies of Labour,” Manchester School of