后殖民时代的掠夺 量化1960-2018年西方掠夺全球南方

后殖民时代的掠夺：量化 1960-2018 年不平等交换造成的全球南方流失

https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cnpexx/v26y2021i6p1030-1047.html

Jason Hickel、Dylan Sullivan、Huzaifa Zoomkawala

摘要

本文量化了自 1960 年以来不平等交换造成的全球南方流失。根据我们的主要方法（依赖于汇率差异），我们发现，在最近一年的数据中，全球北方（“发达经济体”）从南方挪用了价值 2.2 万亿美元的商品（按北方价格计算）——足以消除 15 次极端贫困。在整个时期内，来自南方的流失总额为 62 万亿美元（按 2011 年不变美元计算），如果考虑到增长损失，则为 152 万亿美元。通过不平等交换获得的掠夺占北方 GDP 的 7%，占南方 GDP 的 9%。为了进行比较，我们还测试了几种替代方法：我们用工资差异而不是汇率差异来量化不平等交换，并用全球平均价格和北方价格来报告流失。无论采用哪种方法，我们都发现，在 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代的结构调整时期，剥削强度和不平等交换规模显著增加。这项研究证实，南方的流失仍然是后殖民时代世界经济的一个重要特征；富裕国家继续依靠帝国形式的掠夺来维持其高收入和消费水平。

世界正在掠夺非洲“每年数十亿美元”的财富
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/24/world-is-plundering-africa-wealth-billions-of-dollars-a-year

活动人士的研究声称，对非洲大陆的援助和贷款被流向避税天堂的资金和减缓气候变化的成本所抵消

Karen McVeigh 2017 年 5 月 24 日星期三 07.00 BST
根据挑战对外援助“误导性”看法的研究，每年流出非洲的财富比流入非洲的财富多——多出 400 多亿美元（310 亿英镑）。

包括全球正义组织在内的英国和非洲平等与发展活动家联盟于周三发表的分析称，世界其他地区从非洲大陆的财富中获得的利润比大多数非洲公民都多。

报告称，全球公共部门腐败助长民粹主义政客崛起

报告称，2015 年，非洲国家获得了 1620 亿美元，主要是贷款、援助和个人汇款。但同年，非洲大陆却被掠夺了 2030 亿美元，要么是跨国公司直接将利润汇回国内并非法将资金转移到避税天堂，要么是世界其他国家通过适应和减缓气候变化而强加的成本。

根据《2017 年诚实账户》报告，这导致 47 个非洲国家每年出现 413 亿美元的财政赤字，许多人仍陷于贫困之中。

活动人士表示，非法资金流动（定义为国家之间非法现金流动）每年高达 680 亿美元，是非洲获得的 190 亿美元援助的三倍。

Jubilee 债务运动的经济学家 Tim Jones 表示：“我们想要传达的关键信息是，流出非洲的资金多于流入非洲的资金，如果我们要解决贫困和收入不平等问题，就必须帮助非洲挽回损失。”

他说，造成这种不平等现象的关键因素包括不公平的债务支付以及跨国公司通过逃税和腐败隐藏收益。

非洲各国政府在 2015 年获得了 320 亿美元的贷款，但其中一半以上（180 亿美元）用于支付债务利息，债务水平迅速上升。

活动人士表示，目前盛行的说法是富裕国家政府称他们的外援正在帮助非洲，这种说法“分散注意力，具有误导性”。

全球正义运动的 Aisha Dodwell 表示：“西方社会有一种非常强烈的说法，即非洲很穷，需要我们的帮助。这项研究表明，非洲国家真正需要的是世界其他国家停止系统性地掠夺它们。虽然殖民掠夺的形式可能随着时间的推移而发生变化，但其基本性质保持不变。”

报告指出，非洲拥有相当丰富的资源。据估计，南非的潜在矿产财富约为 2.5 万亿美元，而刚果民主共和国的矿产储量被认为价值 24 万亿美元。

然而，报告称，非洲大陆的自然资源由外国私营公司拥有和开采。

加纳 Isodec（综合社会发展中心）政策分析师 Bernard Adaba 表示：“非洲的发展已经无望，而我们每年都在为采掘业、西方避税天堂以及非法伐木和捕鱼而损失数十亿美元。需要进行一些重大的结构性改革，以促进经济政策，使非洲国家能够最好地满足其人民的需求，而不仅仅是成为西方公司和政府的摇钱树。非洲的血流必须停止！”

然而，发展智库全球发展中心客座研究员玛雅·福斯塔特表示，该报告没有对这些问题进行有意义的审视。

福斯塔特说：“非洲有 12 亿人口。这份报告似乎将这些人及其机构视为一个惰性的桶，资金被注入或偷走，而不是充满活力和不断增长的经济体的一部分。他们提出的 410 亿美元标题需要放在非洲整体 GDP 约为 7.7 万亿美元的背景下。经济增长不是通过储存流入和防止流出来实现的，而是通过让人们投资和学习、采用技术和进入市场来实现的。

“报告提出的一些问题——例如非法砍伐、捕鱼和适应气候变化的成本——很重要，但把所有明显的流入和流出加在一起是没有意义的。”

福斯塔特还质疑了该报告的一些方法。

包括 Jubilee Debt Campaign、Health Poverty Action 和 Uganda Debt Network 在内的活动人士联盟表示，那些声称帮助非洲的人“需要重新考虑他们的角色”，并指出英国政府由于其作为海外避税天堂网络的首脑而负有特殊责任。

伦敦政治经济学院的经济人类学家 Jason Hickel 博士在评论该报告时表示，普遍的对外援助观点是扭曲的。

Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018

https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cnpexx/v26y2021i6p1030-1047.html

Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, Huzaifa Zoomkawala

Abstract

This paper quantifies drain from the global South through unequal exchange since 1960. According to our primary method, which relies on exchange-rate differentials, we find that in the most recent year of data the global North (‘advanced economies’) appropriated from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion in Northern prices — enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), or $152 trillion when accounting for lost growth. Appropriation through unequal exchange represents up to 7% of Northern GDP and 9% of Southern GDP. We also test several alternative methods, for comparison: we quantify unequal exchange in terms of wage differentials instead of exchange-rate differentials, and report drain in global average prices as well as Northern prices. Regardless of the method, we find that the intensity of exploitation and the scale of unequal exchange increased significantly during the structural adjustment period of the 1980s and 1990s. This study affirms that drain from the South remains a significant feature of the world economy in the post-colonial era; rich countries continue to rely on imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and consumption.

By Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala， 6 May 2021

Protesters show a sign that reads 'The debt is with the people, not the IMF' during a demonstration at Plaza de Mayo on Aug 15, 2019, in Buenos Aires, Argentina 

We have long known that the industrial rise of rich countries depended on extraction from the global South during the colonial era. Europe’s industrial revolution relied in large part on cotton and sugar, which were grown on land stolen from Indigenous Americans, with forced labour from enslaved Africans. Extraction from Asia and Africa was used to pay for infrastructure, public buildings, and welfare states in Europe – all the markers of modern development. The costs to the South, meanwhile, were catastrophic: genocide, dispossession, famine and mass impoverishment.

Imperial powers finally withdrew most of their flags and armies from the South in the mid-20th century. But over the following decades, economists and historians associated with “dependency theory” argued that the underlying patterns of colonial appropriation remained in place and continued to define the global economy. Imperialism never ended, they argued – it just changed form.

They were right. Recent research demonstrates that rich countries continue to rely on a large net appropriation from the global South, including tens of billions of tonnes of raw materials and hundreds of billions of hours of human labour per year – embodied not only in primary commodities, but also in high-tech industrial goods like smartphones, laptops, computer chips and cars, which over the past few decades have come to be overwhelmingly manufactured in the South.

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This flow of net appropriation occurs because prices are systematically lower in the South than in the North. For instance, wages paid to Southern workers are on average one-fifth the level of Northern wages. This means that for every unit of embodied labour and resources that the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units to pay for it.

Economists Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel described this as a “hidden transfer of value” from the South, which sustains high levels of income and consumption in the North. The drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.

In a recent paper published in the journal New Political Economy, we built on the work of Amin and others to quantify the scale of drain through unequal exchange in the post-colonial era. We found that the drain increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, as neoliberal structural adjustment programmes were imposed across the global South. Today, the global North drains from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion per year, in Northern prices. For perspective, that amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, fifteen times over.

Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain totalled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.

These are extraordinary sums. For the global North (and here we mean the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea, and the rich economies of Europe), the gains are so large that, for the past couple of decades, they have outstripped the rate of economic growth. In other words, net growth in the North relies on appropriation from the rest of the world.

For the South, the losses outstrip foreign aid transfers by a wide margin. For every dollar of aid the South receives, they lose $14 in drain through unequal exchange alone, not counting other kinds of losses like illicit financial outflows and profit repatriation. Of course, the ratio varies by country – higher for some than others – but in all cases, the discourse of aid obscures a darker reality of plunder. Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.

Neoclassical economists tend to see low wages in the South as “natural” – a kind of neutral market outcome. But Amin and other economists from the global South argued that wage inequalities are artefacts of political power.

Rich countries have a monopoly on decision-making in the World Bank and IMF, they hold most of the bargaining power in the World Trade Organization, they use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy in debtor nations, and they control 97 percent of the world’s patents. Northern states and corporations leverage this power to cheapen the prices of labour and resources in the global South, which allows them to achieve a net appropriation through trade.

During the 1980s and 1990s, IMF structural adjustment programmes cut public sector wages and employment, while rolling back labour rights and other protective regulations, all of which cheapened labour and resources. Today, poor countries are structurally dependent on foreign investment and have no choice but to compete with one another to offer cheap labour and resources in order to please the barons of international finance. This ensures a steady flow of disposable gadgets and fast fashion to affluent Northern consumers, but at extraordinary cost to human lives and ecosystems in the South.

There are several ways to fix this problem. One would be to democratise the institutions of global economic governance, so that poor countries have a fairer say in setting the terms of trade and finance. Another step would be to ensure that poor countries have the right to use tariffs, subsidies and other industrial policies to build sovereign economic capacity. We could also take steps toward a global living wage system and an international framework for environmental regulations, which would put a floor on labour and resource prices.

All of this would enable the South to capture a fairer share of income from international trade and free its countries to mobilise their resources around ending poverty and meeting human needs. But achieving these goals will not be easy; it will require an organised front among social movements toward a fairer world, against those who profit so prodigiously from the status quo.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

• Jason Hickel

  Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

  Dr Jason Hickel is a Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of The Divide and Less is More

• 

  Dylan Sullivan

  Adjunct Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University

• 

  Huzaifa Zoomkawala

  Independent scholar and data analyst based in Karachi.

World is plundering Africa's wealth of 'billions of dollars a year'

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/24/world-is-plundering-africa-wealth-billions-of-dollars-a-year

Research by campaigners claims aid and loans to the continent are outweighed by financial flows to tax havens and costs of climate change mitigation

More wealth leaves Africa every year than enters it – by more than $40bn (£31bn) – according to research that challenges “misleading” perceptions of foreign aid.

Analysis by a coalition of UK and African equality and development campaigners including Global Justice Now, published on Wednesday, claims the rest of the world is profiting more than most African citizens from the continent’s wealth.

Global public sector corruption fuels rise of populist politicians, report says

It said African countries received $162bn in 2015, mainly in loans, aid and personal remittances. But in the same year, $203bn was taken from the continent, either directly through multinationals repatriating profits and illegally moving money into tax havens, or by costs imposed by the rest of the world through climate change adaptation and mitigation.

This led to an annual financial deficit of $41.3bn from the 47 African countries where many people remain trapped in poverty, according to the report, Honest Accounts 2017.

The campaigners said illicit financial flows, defined as the illegal movement of cash between countries, account for $68bn a year, three times as much as the $19bn Africa receives in aid.

Tim Jones, an economist from the Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: “The key message we want to get across is that more money flows out of Africa than goes in, and if we are to address poverty and income inequality we have to help to get it back.”

The key factors contributing to this inequality include unjust debt payments and multinational companies hiding proceeds through tax avoidance and corruption, he said.

African governments received $32bn in loans in 2015, but paid more than half of that – $18bn – in debt interest, with the level of debt rising rapidly.

The prevailing narrative, where rich country governments say their foreign aid is helping Africa, is “a distraction and misleading”, the campaigners said.

Aisha Dodwell, a campaigner for Global Justice Now, said: “There’s such a powerful narrative in western societies that Africa is poor and that it needs our help. This research shows that what African countries really need is for the rest of the world to stop systematically looting them. While the form of colonial plunder may have changed over time, its basic nature remains unchanged.”

The report points out that Africa has considerable riches. South Africa’s potential mineral wealth is estimated to be around $2.5tn, while the mineral reserves of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are thought to be worth $24tn.

However, the continent’s natural resources are owned and exploited by foreign, private corporations, the report said.

Bernard Adaba, policy analyst with Isodec (Integrated Social Development Centre) in Ghana said: “Development is a lost cause in Africa while we are haemorrhaging billions every year to extractive industries, western tax havens and illegal logging and fishing. Some serious structural changes need to be made to promote economic policies that enable African countries to best serve the needs of their people, rather than simply being cash cows for western corporations and governments. The bleeding of Africa must stop!”

However, Maya Forstater, a visiting fellow for the Centre for Global Development, a development thinktank, said the report did not provide a meaningful look at the issues.

Forstater said: “There are 1.2 billion people in Africa. This report seems to view these people and their institutions as an inert bucket into which money is poured or stolen away, rather than as part of dynamic and growing economies. The $41bn headline they come up with needs to be put into context that the overall GDP of Africa is some $7.7tn. Economies do not grow by stockpiling inflows and preventing outflows but by enabling people to invest and learn, adapt technologies and access markets.

“Some of the issues that the report raises – such as illegal logging, fishing and the cost of adapting to climate change – are important, but adding together all apparent inflows and outflows is meaningless.”

Forstater also questioned some of the report’s methodology.

The coalition of campaigners, including Jubilee Debt Campaign, Health Poverty Action, and Uganda Debt Network, said those claiming to help Africa “need to rethink their role”, and singled out the British government as bearing special responsibility because of its position as the head of a network of overseas tax havens.

Dr Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist at the London School of Economics, commenting on the report, agreed that the prevailing view of foreign aid was skewed. Hickel said: “One of the many problems with the aid narrative is it leads the public to believe that rich countries are helping developing countries, but that narrative skews the often extractive relationship that exists between rich and poor countries.”

A key issue, he said, was illicit financial flows, via multinational corporations, to overseas tax havens. “Britain has a direct responsibility to fix the problem if they want to claim to care about international poverty at all,” he said.

The report makes a series of recommendations, including preventing companies with subsidiaries based in tax havens from operations in African countries, transforming aid into a process that genuinely benefits the continent, and reconfiguring aid from a system of voluntary donations to one of repatriation for damage caused.