There are three sets of nations from whom Russia can learn about how to integrate into the global economic system. The developed countries such as United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan demonstrate how developments over several decades if not couple of centuries can influence national business systems and hence international competitiveness. They also show how a country’s national business system responds to international relationships before and after membership in multilateral trade organizations such as the WTO and its predecessor, the GATT. A second set of countries from which some lessons could be learned is the newly industrializing countries (NICs) such as Korea, Brazil, and India. Here the key issue is the long time for transition that these countries got to transit into a more open trade regime. Also, the experience of Chile in making the transition by planned, pre-announced, and progressive reduction of tariffs could have some lessons. Finally, a large, centrally planned economy such as China holds some instructive lessons in the sequencing of domestic policy and institutional changes and opening of trade regimes.
Editor’s Note: though focused on Russia, this article discusses some interesting national business systems issues and goes into a fair amount of detail about China in particular.
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