Crime Against Humanity: Pensée Unique in Economics, 44

A key example of wholly unnecessary foreign investment is Thailand or Korea in the mid to late 1990s. On pressure from the US Treasury, the IMF and their central banks, both countries liberalized their capital flows. The central banks then took policies to encourage borrowing from abroad, namely to reaffirm publicly their determination to maintain the dollar pegs, while raising domestic interest rates above US dollar rates. Companies in both countries reacted rationally by borrowing significant sums from foreign investors, despite the fact that both countries had substantial savings and functioning banking systems that could have created this money domestically. When the foreign investors decided to cancel their loans at short notice, large−scale bankruptcies were triggered and foreign investors could acquire assets and market shares that earlier they could only dream of.
Meanwhile an example of successful technology transfer is Japan, which achieved it by sending students and apprentices abroad, and by inviting foreign experts to Japan to transfer their knowledge. This method does not generate the type of kickbacks or windfall gains that foreign investment may generate in the short term for a small group of locals, and it may take a little while to reveal its fruits. But empirical evidence shows that this method has been successful in transferring only technology, without also inviting foreign control and draining domestic resources. With many developing countries the problems are, however, more basic, as they are not even mobilizing given domestic resources properly, and neither do they make sufficient use of the technology that is already available and which thus does not need to be paid for in foreign currency.”