Poor economies (think underdeveloped economies) do incentivize repair over replacement. Cases in point, cars in Cuba, Former USSR republics, etc. You will also find repairshops for electronics in many developing economies as well. Labor to repair a unit makes a repair affordable whereas buying a new unit might be prohibitive.
In developed nations, labor is too expensive to make a repair worthwhile for things people can regularly afford. It's only as things become expensive that repairing something makes economic sense (a $100 replacement screen for a phone is economically viable vs buying a new $600 phone). Conversely very few people in the US for example would think of repairing an old Microwave when buying a new one is only marginally more expensive than getting a new one.
Indeed, a good example of that is the fact that people export very old used cars from Europe to Africa, because due to the much lower cost of repair their value in Africa is higher than their value in Europe (nil), enough to make it worth the shipping!
Unless you can find repairpeople willing to work for a great deal less than minimum wage it's going to be hard to make this work on most gear. Labor alone is enough to kill repair efforts. Even if corporations tried to make more repairable gear it wouldn't help if labor is still too expensive to make it worth it. (And if that's true, then making the gear less repairable and cheaper becomes a rational response to the market rather than a conspiracy.)
Sigh. I disposed of an otherwise perfectly good 49" television last week because something on the IR receiver board failed. What leads I could find for a replacement board (a) had them listed around 50% of what a comparable replacement television costs today and (b) didn't actually have any to sell me.
Upside, I now have a much bigger and nicer TV that was 40% of what the old one cost.
In developed nations, labor is too expensive to make a repair worthwhile for things people can regularly afford. It's only as things become expensive that repairing something makes economic sense (a $100 replacement screen for a phone is economically viable vs buying a new $600 phone). Conversely very few people in the US for example would think of repairing an old Microwave when buying a new one is only marginally more expensive than getting a new one.