That is, any developing country is presented with 2 options by the developed world: either accept 'free trade' (allow foreign investors to buy up the local industry, commit to IP laws, don't apply tariffs) or no one will be allowed to trade with you or send you aid.
In the meantime, powerful countries are taking numerous protectionist measures in their key industries, since that is the only way to actually be prosperous.
Do multi-national trade agreements (which I believe are the core mechanism for this) actually penalize signatories for trading with non-signatories? Or is it more that trade between signatories is so advantaged that no company within a signatory state would be competitive were it to trade with a counterpart in a non-signatory state?
Not exactly. Between forcing their hand on disadvantageous trade deals, lodging complaints and enforcing restrictions with the WTO, and outright installing dictators and funding militias - allowing or disallowing is all what the first world ever does.
Forget about the third-world, right now the USA is not-allowing Germany the right to build a pipeline with Russia!
First-world - check, sovereign - check, allies - check.
The USA is threatening trade sanctions if Germany builds the pipeline. I would not call that "not-allowing".
That seems to be OP's whole point. The US is responding as a sovereign nation to actions of other sovereign nations. Phraseology like "allow" and "disallow" are not accurate. If Germany does the cost-benefit analysis and decides to cancel the pipeline because they don't want trade sanctions, that was their decision as an independent nation. It is not as if we are threatening war.
When the US pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, for example, it essentially ordered European companies not to trade with Iran. Even European companies that have no business in the US are afraid to do business with Iran, because American secondary sanctions will still hit them. No European bank will lend to a European company that does business with Iran, out of fear of American sanctions.
These sorts of actions will eventually provoke a reaction: either the establishment of alternate financial systems or retaliatory sanctions.
Are allowed to break the law? Are you not?
If the US wants to impose a tariff to nations that do X, that does not mean that the US is forcing these nations to do anything. They can pay the tarrif, change their behavior, or sell their goods elsewhere. Or they can charge a counter-tarrif -- oops, not if they are an export-dependent economy they can't. That's the crux of the issue.
Germany needs to pay their own workers enough so the German economy is not dependent on exporting a 1/3 of their GDP each year just to maintain domestic employment.
Obviously when you create an economy that crashes the moment others stop letting you run massive trade surpluses, then you are effectively handing your sovereignty over to your trading partners.
Whining about that and blaming your trading partners for using the power Germany has given them seems a bit naive.
Germany will never be sovereign as long as it is an export-dependent economy.
ding ding ding. Germany is allowed to build whatever pipelines they want, they just also might have to pay US trade sanctions. Without a threat of force, we are not forcing them to do anything.
The USA didn't just do it to voice their displeasure: they could have done that with an email.
They truly think its enough of a hammer to stop the pipeline.
Hence "won't allow"
The reason these countries were allowed to do it where others are not was because the US wanted strategically placed powerful allies in the region.
There probably wouldn't be a Japanese electronics/car industry, for instance, if the Soviets hadn't spooked the the US in the 40s.
Japan's industrial base was built before the 40s, with an extensive domestic supply of machine tools and industrial equipment, rail infrastructure, and finished manufactured goods. Or else who do you think was building the planes, ships, and submarines that the allies were fighting on the Pacific front? Their industries were temporarily damaged by the war but it's no surprise that they'd be back to building cars within a couple decades.
They, rather than the US, were the ones who built up much of the initial industrial base of Taiwan and Korea, as part of their own colonization efforts. Not out of so much benevolence, of course.
Their skill base was intact but their industry was razed by WW2.
Either way they needed raw materials and markets to develop their industrial base and that required favorable American trade policy, $$$ and military support.
'Allow' implies some degree of forgiveness or allowance of entity on the other side of the table.
In this case, Ghana may probably face trade sanction/scrutiny for their protectionism. It will have to play out in terms of other agreements.
Oh, it's much simpler than that. If an undeveloped (or developing) country doesn't place nice with the "Developed" rules, the IMF will just bankrupt their currency and send them back to the dark ages.
Why do you think Switzerland is the world's 3rd biggest exporter of Coffee [1], while not growing a single bean ? .. and Germany is number 5.
The IMF doesn't let coffee growing countries like Ethiopia or the Ivory Coast export processed beans, because they want the immense profits going to developed countries. Also the WTO plays a role and just doesn't tax unprocessed raw coffee beans coming out of those poor countries, but taxes processed coffee (and chocolate) goods at astronomical rates.
Blackmail poor countries into selling all of their assets to foreign capital, just to gain access to foreign credit.
See what's happening in Cuba. See what Vietnam had to do after the war with the US, see Greece with Europe recently, see countless more.
The WTO, IMF and the World Bank are the colonizing arm of capitalism.
It's a relatively new form of supernational economic warfare that turned out to be very effective, especially when combined with embargoes and economic sanctions. It's the famous "offer one can't refuse".
Only at the conditions imposed by the IMF. Usually that means the state has to steer away from anything that could be profitable and focus only on what is not palatable to foreign capital.
It also means states can't apply import taxes, thus making their industries instantly obsolete. It's pretty much a huge transfer of wealth from inside to outside.
Im going to need a direct example please
Also see this video[1] about Vietnam, around halfway through it explains pretty well how it works.
Edit: I realize now you asked about the "forced privatization of industries" sentence. That's thoroughly stressed accross all IMF literature, and you can see it happen in pretty much every country that takes IMF "aid".
-[0]: https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/02/21...
Not to pick on you, but I often hear this frasing in the 'first world' and surely you dont 'allow' or 'disallow' internal policies to an sovereign nation?
It sounds like a Freudianslip or something, the reality is that its easy to bully or bribe officials in developing nations.