Then after the Second World War, the entire continent of Latin America broke with free trade under the influence of an Argentinian economist named Raul Prebisch, who thought he had found the flaw in Ricardo’s logic, and achieved decades of stagnation. India, under Jawaharlal Nehru, went for autarky too, closing its borders to trade in the hope of sparking a boom in import substitution. It too found stagnation. Still they tried: North Korea under Kim Il Sung, Albania under Enver Hoxha, China under Mao Zedong, Cuba under Fidel Castro – every country that tried protectionism suffered. Countries
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