Help the NICs.

Countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, and Brazil--most of them considered "backward" as recently as 20 years ago--now churn out television sets, integrated circuits, steel, and automobiles. The remarkable economic transition of these newly industrialized countries (NICs) poses a tremendous economic and political challenge to the United States and other industrial countries. The NICs provide over half of United States imports of consumer manufactures. While the giant trade surpluses of the Asian Tigers are largely due to trade with the United States, their prosperity has not come at America's expense. And while they are slowly opening their economies to trade, some stubborn barriers to imports remain. The United States absorbs nearly half of developing-country exports of manufactured products, most of which come from the Asian Tigers and Mexico. Europe takes 25 percent of developing-country exports, and Japan takes 10 percent. Clearly, Europe and Japan should be doing more to stimulate demand, but the capacity of all industrial nations to absorb new imports from the emerging NICs and poorer developing countries is much greater than supposed.