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I guess it's not quite obvious to me what is wrong with this. as long as people are giving stuff away, why not take it and focus on producing things you can't g

I guess it's not quite obvious to me what is wrong with this. as long as people are giving stuff away, why not take it and focus on producing things you can't get for free? it's hard to imagine how the supply of second-hand shoes/tshirts/whatever could crash overnight. if people in rich countries stopped replacing perfectly serviceable goods, they would probably do it slowly enough for the former beneficiaries to start domestic production. purely monetary aid seems like a substantially greater risk. politics could turn off that faucet in an instant.

bobthepanda 6y ago
So far, the countries with advanced manufacturing got there by learning the ropes on less sophisticated product. Before China, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea had large service sectors and advanced manufacturing, they had to develop a large working class of manufacturing workers to provide demand for goods, and develop the sophistication to at least make things like toys and clothes reliably first before they jumped into semiconductors and phones and LCDs. When a country is dominated by donated or secondhand goods, the need to develop the knowhow and ability to manufacture anything reliably and cost-effectively isn't needed for entry-level goods (since those are all available secondhand for cheap) but you can't bootstrap any manufacturing as a result.