Die Eingliederung der Entwicklungsländer in die substitutive weltwirtschaftliche Arbeitsteilung am Beispiel von Singapur, West-Malaysia und Pakistan

Abstract Small and declining shares in world-trade, unbalanced export structures and unstable export receipts still characterize the developing countries' position in the world economy. The advantages of integration into the international division of labour are increasingly doubted for developing countries, and frequently, a strategy of self-sufficiency and self-reliance aimed at the home market is proposed for those countries to overcome their alleged dependency upon the world market. This, however, overlooks the fact that the integration-oriented strategy itself aims to overcome this dependency and to change the present largely complementary international division of labour into a substitutive one, based on the exchange of manufactured goods. These considerations rest upon the "traditional" theory of international trade and, especially, upon the factor-proportions-theorem, according to which a country will export those commodities whose production makes intensive use of the factor of production relatively abundant in that country, and import commodities whose production uses a lot of the relatively scarce factor of production. Both the crucial assumption for the validity of this theorem and the theorem itself are tested empirically on the examples of Singapore, West Malaysia and Pakistan because of the great differences between their trade policies. Empirical results show that the factor-proportions-theorem is valid especially for Singapore and West Malaysia, but less so for Pakistan. These different results can, to a large extent, be attributed to the trade policies followed by these countries. While in Singapore and West Malaysia trade policy has aimed at integration into the substitutive international division of labour, trade policy in Pakistan has been oriented towards the home market and has, through excessively high protection rates, made her integration into the substitutive international division of labour more difficult. Success or failure of the integration of the developing countries into the world economy, therefore, depends, to a large extent, upon the economic policy followed by the countries themselves.