Thread by @RnaudBertrand

This fascinating Nature study (link in the bottom) by @jasonhickel and others should destroy for ever the myth that workers in the Global South "steal jobs" at the expense of the Global North.

They find an astonishing metric that "while Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income."

Meaning of course that the lifestyle of the North is subsidized by the work of the South: if we lived in a fair world, those contributing 90% of the labor should theoretically receive 90% of the income, not 21%... Concretely, the study calculates that "an extra 826 billion hours of Southern labour [the equivalent to 369 million workers] is effectively appended to Northern economies as invisible “ghost workers”, [which is] more than the total workforce of the United States and the European Union combined".

And before I hear you say "yes but it's all low skilled labor", that's not true at all. As per the study, "the South contributed the majority of labour across all skill levels: 76% of all high-skilled labour, 91% of medium-skilled labour and 96% of low-skilled labour". In fact, astonishingly: "the South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined."

You could also say "yes but it's just a temporary situation: as global South countries develop they'll progressively become like the North", but that's precisely what this study shows is impossible because "the North’s development model relies on appropriation from elsewhere".

This implies two things: 1) the North has no incentive for the South to develop because their very model depends on appropriation from the South and 2) the South can't develop like the North because they have no South of their own to exploit. They need to find their own model that doesn't rely on exploitation, akin to China who developed with their own workers (and is progressively using more and more robots as its workforce gains in skills).

Also, the South catching up with the North is not the direction at all, except for some rare exceptions. The studies shows that, on average, "wages of Southern workers are 83–98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector" and these wage gaps "have increased substantially over time, across all skill levels and all sectors, indicating a steady increase in absolute North–South income inequality".

So what's the solution? The study concludes that "development and poverty eradication, and any plausible trajectory for reducing global inequality, requires a shift in the balance of power between North and South, such that the latter is able to reclaim its productive capacities to meet human needs. Toward this end, international wage floors and minimum resource prices could help reduce price inequalities and limit value transfers. Ending unequal exchange will also require ending structural adjustment conditions on finance, and democratising the institutions of global economic governance, so that global South governments are free to use industrial, fiscal and monetary policy to pursue sovereign development and reduce their dependency on Northern capital. Such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above, however. It will require a political struggle for national self-determination and economic sovereignty similar in scope to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century."

Link to the study: nature.com/articles/s4146…