Activity

We are told that free trade would create an international division of labour, and thereby give to each country the production which is in harmony with its natural advantage. You believe, perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centu…

[...] debt stocks have not reduced much at all. In fact, they have increased. External debt as a percentage of gross national income in the global South was 25 per cent in 1980, when the debt crisis struck. At the end of the first decade of structural adjustment, it was up to 38 per cent. By the en…

[...] given that structural adjustment destroyed growth rates, we can conclude that much of it came instead from the appropriation of already existing wealth. By requiring debtor countries to privatise public assets, the World Bank ad the IMF created opportunities for foreign companies to buy up te…

To avoid having to confront domestic resistance, which can be politically costly, policymakers might solve a crisis of over-accumulation by resorting to a 'spatial fix'--in other words, by opening up new consumer markets, labour markets and investment markets abroad.