Thread by @jasonhickel

I’m excited to share this new paper we have out, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy”. The results confirm that the global North relies on a massive net appropriation of resources and labour from the South. The figures are quite staggering. 🧵sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

In 2015, the North’s net appropriation from the South included:

-12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents
-822 million hectares of embodied land
-21 Exajoules of embodied energy
-188 million person-years of embodied labour

Two quick things before we go on: (a) “Embodied” here means inputs embodied in the production of traded goods, including manufactured products. (b) We use the IMF’s “advanced economies” list as a proxy for the global North.

To put these figures in perspective:

-12 billion tons of raw material equivalents is 43% of the North’s annual material consumption. In other words, *nearly half* of the North’s material consumption is net appropriated from the South.

-822 million hectares of land (more than twice the size of India), would in theory be enough to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on land productivity and diet.

-21 Exajoules of energy would be enough to cover the annual energy requirements of building infrastructure to ensure that all 6.5 billion people in the global South have access to decent housing, public transport, healthcare, education, sanitation, communication, etc.

In other words, all of this productive capacity *could* be used to provide for local human needs, but instead it is roped into servicing capital accumulation in the North. Patterns of net appropriation reproduce deprivation in the South.

These results also confirm that much of the ecological impact of resource use in the global North is effectively offshored to the global South. The North benefits from appropriated resources while the South suffers the damage.

How much are these resources worth? It is impossible to say precisely, as prices are a political artefact. But if represented in Northern prices the drain amounts to $10.8 trillion in the final year of data (2015). That would be enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over.

For the North, the drain represents a huge windfall, equivalent to a quarter of their GDP. But the true value to Northern capital cannot be calculated: this arrangement sustains the very possibility of growthism in the North, and stabilizes capital accumulation itself.

We also compared aid flows to drain, and found that for every dollar of aid that recipients get they lose on average $30 through drain to donor countries. Poorer countries are developing richer countries, not the other way around.

Finally, a big shout-out to my brilliant co-authors @C_Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland and Intan Suwandi, whose work continues to inspire me, and to the many scholars whose research we drew on for this paper.