▶ Your Answer :
Some people might think that people had better to buy domestic goods instead of foreign ones regardless of their costs. This is because this consumption supports domestic market, which would be helpful to country’s economic situation. However, in my opinion, buying domestic goods instead of foreign ones without considering cost is not good for economy for two reasons.
First of all, competition between domestic and foreign products bring about the increase of quality. It is known that appropriate competition in the market causes the decrease of price and better quality products, which is in turn beneficial to both customers and country’s economy in the long-run. If people purchase domestic goods instead of foreign without considering costs, domestic firms would charge high price and not try to improve their products because they know that people would buy their goods without those efforts. To be specific, from 1990 to the middle of 2000, Korean people wanted to buy their domestic cars rather than foreign ones because they thought that this would help country’s economic situation. However, Korean automobile firms exploited consumer’s good intention, so they sold products costly to domestic people, but sold the same products to foreign customers with lower price. Sometimes they used inferior components for products in domestic market. After this was revealed, people stopped to buy domestic cars unconditionally. Rather, this improved the quality of automobiles and the prices were decreased because of competition.
Moreover, countries have to follow the trend of globalization in which each country specialises some products. After some economists revealed that specialisation and trade result in more profitable situation, countries more and more interact each other in many fields and we called it ‘globalization’. This trend is unavoidable and actually very profitable for both countries. So, countries are concentrated on producing what they can make with high quality but low cost and trading with other countries’ specialized products. Then, consumers can buy goods of better quality with cheaper price. However, consuming domestic goods rather than foreign ones regardless of costs would prevent this trend. To be specific, as I mentioned above, Korean people including me tried to use domestic goods. At that time, I used a computer from domestic firm which was very expensive. However, after trend had changed, I bought a much better computer with very low price because high quality computers from United States were imported. Even though domestic computer firms had some troubles in selling their products, soon they changed their field to what Korean people had lots of knowledge about and earned far more profits. Therefore, this trend shift caused good result to both customers and firms.
In conclusion, buying domestic goods instead of foreign ones without considering cost is not good for economy. This is attributed to the fact that competition between domestic and foreign products bring about the increase of quality and countries have to follow the trend of globalisation in which each country specialises some products. |