This background is, of course, not accidental. Economic thinking in Israel was very much influenced, in the last decades, by the agenda of the more developed industrial economies. Early on we realized that free trade agreements and low custom duties, although painful in the short-run, are a necessary condition for sustainable growth of a small economy like that of Israel.
This state of affairs is taken to-day as given and nobody contemplates seriously protecting Israeli industry from foreign competition by tariff and non-tariff barriers, as we used to do in the past. *** Nevertheless, there is still a bridge that we have not completely crossed. We already understand that to get integrated with the world economy we have to follow some rules.