Rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves successfully used in the past.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves successfully used in the past." in the context of "Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, Ch. 2, Learning the right lessons from history, p. 61 (2008)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.