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National protectionism has the same problems as state or city level import restrictions would No, it usually doesn't. There are benefits of scale but there are
by blfr 9y ago
National protectionism has the same problems as state or city level import restrictions would
No, it usually doesn't. There are benefits of scale but there are also diminishing returns.
Having, say, a steel mill in every town would be a huge waste but centralizing all steel production in one place on the globe would provide only a very minor, if any, benefit over doing it in fifty countries at the massive hidden cost of now world-wide fragility of steel supply. (This almost happened with hard drives.)
- closeparen 9y agoThe world's countries have drastically different scale. If we are concerned with the point of diminishing returns on industrial economies of scale, aren't those the same everywhere? Shouldn't large countries be partitioning into several economic zones, while small countries unify, into groups of about the same size?