This new paper really upends conventional narratives about international development. Basically, poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around. I'll highlight the key points in the thread below:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
1. High-income countries rely on a large *net appropriation* of resources from the global South, including:
-10.1 billion tons of raw materials
-379 billion hours of human labour
-22.7 EJ of energy
-800 million hectares of land
That's for a single year, 2015.
-10.1 billion tons of raw materials
-379 billion hours of human labour
-22.7 EJ of energy
-800 million hectares of land
That's for a single year, 2015.
2. In other words, rich countries take significantly more resources and labour from the global South than they give. But this net appropriation is not accompanied by a net payment of funds. On the contrary, high-income nations maintain a monetary *surplus* in trade.
3. How? Because rich countries command high prices for their own resource exports, but appropriate resources from the rest of the world for well below global average prices.
4. This is not because high-income countries are technologically superior, or more productive. The study finds that price differences are due to power imbalances in the global economy. Richer countries can command higher prices for their exports than poorer countries.
5. So what does this mean for international development? It means that poorer countries don't need charity, or aid; what they need is justice: specifically, they need fairer prices for their labour and resources.
6. The paper was led by Christian Dorninger, at the helm of a brilliant team of high-profile scientists. If you'd like to engage with Christian directly, you can reach him here: kli.ac.at/en/people/curr…
For those of you saying "but we have known this for a long time." Yes, of course we have; for as long as colonialism has been a reality. This paper does not make claims to new theory; it simply quantifies total resource drain on a global scale.
Some seem to be under the odd impression that I am unaware of previous contributions to dependency/WS/UE/anticolonial theory. I have spent my life reading Fanon, Cesaire, Gandhi, Rodney, Nkrumah, Galeano, Prebisch, Gunder Frank, Wallerstein, Amin, Emmanuel, Marx, Luxemburg, etc.
One would have to be willfully ignorant of my work to assume otherwise. Indeed, I build explicitly on this tradition in The Divide, in my own attempt at "upending conventional narratives", which always needs doing, because those narratives are extremely powerful and widespread.
As someone who knows this literature well, I am thrilled about a contribution that quantifies the scale of ecological unequal exchange in the contemporary period, and I think we can make good use of it. We should applaud the work that's been done here.
