In a recent article How The West Is Strangling Putin’s Economy for The New York Times, Paul Krugman makes this point about international trade:

One final point: The effect of sanctions on Russia offers a graphic, if grisly, demonstration of a point economists often try to make, but rarely manage to get across: Imports, not exports, are the point of international trade.

That is, the benefits of trade shouldn’t be measured by the jobs and incomes created in export industries; those workers could, after all, be doing something else. The gains from trade come, instead, from the useful goods and services other countries provide to your citizens. And running a trade surplus isn’t a “win”; if anything, it means that you’re giving the world more than you get, receiving nothing but i.o.u.s in return.

That’s quite a deceit!

Now, he has some caveats but tries to minimise them. But the main point about imports, not exports being the point of international trade is something top corporations claim since they want to open markets in poor countries. This reminds of Joan Robinson’s quote that free trade is a subtle form of mercantilism. A poor country needs protection from foreign competition. In Post-Keynesian theory, exports/success of corporations in international markets is quite important. As Anthony Thirlwall in the paper Kaldor’s 1970 Regional Growth Model Revisited says about Nicholas Kaldor’s model (which I believe):

The first proposition of the model is that regional growth is driven by export growth. Kaldor regarded exports as the only true autonomous component of aggregate demand, not just at the regional level but also at the national level because consumption and investment demand are largely induced by the growth of output itself …

So that’s quite the opposite view from mainstream economics.