A brief summary of what was understood in this article.

72 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism easier, and so on. This means that the government needs to regu. late the market more actively and sometimes even deliberately Create some markets. Third, in those stages, the government needs to do many things itself through state-owned enterprises because there are simply not enough capable private sector firms that can take up large-scale, high-risk projects (see Thing 12). Despite their own history, the rich countries make developing countries open their borders and expose their economies to the full forces of global competition, using the conditions attached to their bilateral foreign aid and to the loans from international financial institutions that they control (such as the IMF and the World Bank) as well as the ideological influence that they exercise through intellectual dominance. In promoting policies that they did not use when they were developing countries themselves, they are saying to the developing countries, 'Do as I say, not as I did." A pro-growth doctrine that reduces growth When the historical hypocrisy of the rich countries is pointed out, some defenders of the free market come back and say: 'Well, protectionism and other interventionist policies may have worked in nineteenth-century America or mid twentieth-century Japan, but haven't the developing countries monumentally screwed up when they tried such policies in the 1960s and 70s?' What may have worked in the past, they say, is not necessarily going to work today. The truth is that developing countries did not do badly at all during the 'bad old days' of protectionism and state intervention in the 1960s and 70s. In fact, their economic growth performance during the period was far superior to that achieved since the 1980s under greater opening and deregulation. Since the 1980s, in addition to rising inequality (which was toThing 7 73 be expected from the pro-rich nature of the reforms - see Thing 13), most developing countries have experienced a significant deceleration in economic growth. Per capita income growth in the developing world fell from 3 per cent per year in the 1960s and 70s to 1.7 per cent during the 1980-2000 period, when there was the greatest number of free-market reforms. During the 2000s, there was a pick-up in the growth of the developing world, bringing the growth rate up to 2.6 per cent for the 1980-2009 period, but this was largely due to the rapid growth of China and India - two giants that, while liberalizing, did not embrace neo-liberal policies. Growth performances in regions that have faithfully followed the neo-liberal recipe - Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa - have been much inferior to what they had in the "bad old days'. In the 1960s and 70s, Latin America grew at 3.1 per cent in per capita terms. Between 1980 and 2009, it grew at a rate just above one-third that - I. I per cent. And even that rate was partly due to the rapid growth of countries in the region that had explicitly rejected neo-liberal policies sometime earlier in the 2000s - Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela. Sub-Saharan Africa grew at 1.6 per cent in per capita terms during the 'bad old days', but its growth rate was only 0.2 per cent between 1980 and 2009 (see Thing 11). To sum up, the free-trade, free-market policies are policies that have rarely, if ever, worked. Most of the rich countries did not use such policies when they were developing countries them- selves, while these policies have slowed down growth and increased income inequality in the developing countries in the last three decades. Few countries have become rich through free- trade, free-market policies and few ever will