Where does this come from?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Two books written the better part of a century apart (For Us The Living and an upcoming book that I won't mention by name) have a similar plot development: after the old world [1] suffers a terrible calamity, the regions that were unaffected by the calamity cut off all trade to the affected region until such time as it recovers.

Why would this been seen as the right thing to do?

1: In the regional sense in the Heinlein and a more literal sense in the upcoming book.

Comments

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I question even the theory: "price of labour" includes far more than just wages - it includes the cost of finding employees, getting them to the workplace (which may include providing them housing), communicating with them (a nontrivial task in some nations eg Papua New Guinea and Haiti), training them, providing their security, etc. There's also the price of getting equipment to the workplace, getting goods to market, etc. Combined, in troubled/highly corrupt countries, these costs can easily being so high that even zero wages do not provide any competitive advantage.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

"price of labour" includes far more than just wages - it includes the cost of finding employees, getting them to the workplace (which may include providing them housing), communicating with them (a nontrivial task in some nations eg Papua New Guinea and Haiti), training them, providing their security, etc.

Certainly - but if nobody is hiring in PNG, and there's still a demand for labour, theory states that prices will keep going up in stabler countries until it becomes cost-effective to pay all those extras.

There's also the price of getting equipment to the workplace, getting goods to market, etc.

Yep, this is one of the places where the theory falls down - see my comment below. The theory of comparative advantage assumes that transport costs are negligible and that it's easy to switch between different types of production, neither of which are always true in the real world.

(Another of the assumptions is that you can't shift production capacity between countries, which also isn't a safe bet - IRL, it may work out cheaper to ship the labourers from a poor country rather than getting them to do the work over there, in which case cheap labour doesn't translate into trade per se.)