Taxing imported goods is unpopular with economists, but it could help the U.S. lower the trade deficit, strengthen its industrial base and safeguard national security.
Senator Sonny Angara
This is but one of the big questions that I think about constantly as a legislator, considering that our home, the Philippines, a low-middle income country, stills deals with abject poverty, gaping inequalities, widespread hunger and malnutrition, homelessness, and joblessness not to mention a raging pandemic.
I posed this same question during an online lecture which I delivered to graduate students of Stanford University’s Public Policy program. Noted economists and thinkers have already propounded several theories on this matter. But as I argued in the lecture, the most compelling framework is the one proposed by Harvard University’s Ricardo Hausmann and MIT’s Cesar Hidalgo on economic complexity.