Ha-Joon Chang

Ha-Joon Chang, born in Seoul in 1963, is a South Korean economist specializing in institutional and development economics. He argues that today's wealthy countries used interventionist policies such as tariffs, subsidies and restrictions on foreign investment to industrialize, and then pressed developing countries to abandon those same tools through free-trade and free-market rules promoted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, a claim disputed by economists who hold that open trade and market liberalization better explain postwar growth. His best known book, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002), made this argument from economic history and won the Gunnar Myrdal Prize and the Wassily Leontief Prize. He taught at the University of Cambridge from 1990 to 2021 before joining SOAS University of London.