https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/14/why-amazon-is-eating-the-world/

Amazon benefits not only from the revenue from externalising its internal services,  but also from the efficiency and oversight induced as a result.

This is similar to the export-driven growth described in Joe Studwell's How Asia Works - East Asian countries gave domestic industries protected markets, conditional on their ability to export and hence prove that they were making goods that were competitive in international markets.

http://www.economist.com/node/9688013
http://www.umac.mo/fba/irer/papers/past/vol11n1_pdf/Article%207.pdf

For Singapore, it's around 5%. In Taiwan, it's north of 10%. This is a ridiculous hurdle for an investment. If you bought an apartment in Singapore and pay a 20% downpayment, transaction costs wipe out 5% of asset value right away, setting you back 25% of your equity.

Wrote a Cython program to analyse a board game. 2 trillion combinations counted in ~30min on one 4GHz i7 core. 113 lines of Cython code. I've forgotten how fast C is.