… is from pages 297-298 of the late UCLA economist William Allen’s excellent 1989 collection of the transcripts of his radio addresses, The Midnight Economist; specifically, it’s from Allen’s August 1986 address “Surpluses and Trade”:
Exported goods embody valuable resources. There would be no point in producing these goods if there were no anticipated market for them, and they are to be produced and sold, not for the sheer love of the activity, but in order to buy foreign goods.
DBx: Yes. Exporting (or, more generally, producing) is a means; the end is importing (or, more generally, consumption).
This reality is one reason why I dislike the term “export-led growth.” A people who genuinely grow wealthier through exporting grow wealthier only insofar as their exports enable these people to import more in order, in turn, to increase their consumption beyond what that consumption would be absent the exporting. The economic growth is, at bottom, made possible by increased per-person production. The fact that in some countries an especially large proportion of that increased production is exported in exchange for imports in no way means that governments that artificially arrange to increase their citizens’ exports will thereby necessarily increase their citizens’ prosperity.
People sell in order buy; people export not for the sake of exporting but, rather, in order to import. People do not buy in order to sell; people do not import in order to export.
…..
Pictured here is Bill Allen (1924-2021).
