Kicking Away the Ladder. Development Strategy in Historical Perspective

Although Britain did not have a trademark law until 1862, Kindleberger notes that ‘as early as the 1830s a number of British manufacturers were continuously engaged in litigation to protect trademarks’.[236] In 1862, it introduced a trademark law (the Merchandise Mark Act), which banned ‘commercial thievery’, such as the forging of trademarks and the labelling of false quantities. In the 1887 revision of the act, mindful of foreign, particularly German, infringement of the British trademark law, the British Parliament specifically added the place or the country of manufacture as part of the necessary ‘trade description’. This revised act banned not only patently false descriptions but also misleading descriptions – such as the then widespread German practice of selling counterfeit Sheffield cutlery with fake logos. According to this act, ‘it [was] a penal offence to sell an article made abroad which has upon it any word or mark leading the purchaser to believe that it is made in England, in the absence of other words denoting the real place of origin’.[237] According to Kindleberger, the law also made specific provision requiring that ‘foreign goods marked with the name of an English dealer carry indication or place name of their foreign origin as well’.[238]

However, the German firms employed a range of measures to get around this act. For example, they placed the country of origin’s stamp on the packaging instead of the individual articles, so that once the packaging was removed customers could not tell the country of origin of the product (a technique said to have been common amongst the imports of watches and files). Alternatively, they would send some articles over in pieces and have them assembled in England (a method apparently common for pianos and bicycles), or would place the stamp for the country of origin where it was practically invisible. Williams documents: ‘One German firm, which exports to England large numbers of sewing-machines, conspicuously labeled “Singers” and “North-British Sewing Machines”, places the Made in Germany stamp in small letters underneath the treadle. Half a dozen seamstresses might combine their strength to turn the machine bottom-upwards, and read the legend: otherwise it would go unread’.[239]

2.4. Policies for Industrial Development: Some Historical Myths and Lessons

In this chapter, I have examined the history of industrial, trade and technological (ITT) policies in a number of NDCs when they were developing countries – Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The picture that emerges from this historical review is fundamentally at odds with the picture held by Neo-Liberal commentators, and indeed by many of their critics.

In this final section of the chapter, I first summarize my review of the role of ITT policies in the development of a number of key individual NDCs (section 2.4.1). I then draw an overall picture from these country profiles and conclude that, while virtually all countries used infant industry promotion measures, there was considerable diversity across countries in terms of the exact policy mix (section 2.4.2). I then compare the ITT policies of the NDCs in earlier times with those of today’s developing countries and argue that, once we consider the productivity gap they need to overcome, today’s developing countries are actually far less protectionist than the NDCs themselves were in the past (section 2.4.3).

2.4.1. Some historical myths and facts about policies in earlier times