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That's the lesson Europe and America learned with import duties years ago. You set duty levels to protect your local industry, it keeps out an international product that customers want and you have no local competitor to. So they open a "screwdriver plant" which just screws the "Made in X" label on.

The local government ends up subsidizing this process, under the claim of creating jobs, to far more than the income from the tarif.

Meanwhile your consumers are still paying more for the product, paying again for the tax breaks and you still haven't protected any local iPad competitor ;-)

edit: A famous example of this is a Ford plant in Chicago that removes seats and windows from Ford vans. There is a stiff US import tarrif on foreign trucks to protect the US truck building industry. Ford builds Transit vans (box van in US speak?) in europe but it would be too expensive to import those into the US so it imports mini-buses = box vans with seats. It then has a plant that removes the seats and windows converting them back into Transit vans to sell.

But the important thing is that high quality seat-removal jobs are kept in the US, a plant in Chicago is paid for by the tax-payers of Chicago and a great American truck building company like Ford is protected from cheap foreign competition by Ford.




This is not always the case. It really depends on how it's done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_substitution_industriali...


The famous example for this in Germany is Nokia of all 'people'.




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