August 19, 2026

Latest Video Sources:

Sources:

SECTION 2:

Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E. T. (2026). Structural adjustment: Damages, reparations and pathways to nonrecurrence. BMJ Global Health, 11. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017221. “They introduced land reforms, labour rights and capital controls; they invested in public healthcare and education; they nationalised key resources; and they used industrial policy and planning to build economic sovereignty. These developmentalist strategies were remarkably successful. During the 1960s and 1970s, real per capita income grew at an average of 3.2% per year across the South, and countries achieved substantial improvements in social outcomes.” (p. 1)

SECTION 3:

Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E. T. (2026). Structural adjustment: Damages, reparations and pathways to nonrecurrence. BMJ Global Health, 11. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017221. "SAPs were implemented beginning in the 1980s and tended to include three main measures: a. Austerity: cuts to public healthcare, education, food subsidies, social security, etc. b. Privatisation: transfer of public services, public industries and assets to private capital. c. Deregulation: removal of industrial policy, tariffs, capital controls and labour protections." (p. 2)

SECTION 4:

Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E. T. (2026). Structural adjustment: Damages, reparations and pathways to nonrecurrence. BMJ Global Health, 11. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017221. "During the neoliberal period there was a dramatic collapse in income and consumption in several global South regions. In Latin America, real income per adult (PPP) declined nearly 15% after 1980 and did not recover its previous levels until 2006. In Sub-Saharan Africa, incomes declined nearly 20% and did not recover their previous level until 2007." (p. 2)

SECTION 5:

Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E. T. (2026). Structural adjustment: Damages, reparations and pathways to nonrecurrence. BMJ Global Health, 11. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017221. "A recent non-peer-reviewed assessment based on the Global Burden of Disease Study calculated that, if other countries adopted policies like Cuba's to ensure universal access to nutritious food, 16 million deaths could have been prevented during the period 1990–2019." (p. 4)

SECTION 6:

Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E. T. (2026). Structural adjustment: Damages, reparations and pathways to nonrecurrence. BMJ Global Health, 11. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017221. "In the final year of available data, these net flows included 12 billion tons of raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of land, 22 exajoules of energy and 826 billion hours of labour." (p. 4)

SECTION 7:

Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E. T. (2026). Structural adjustment: Damages, reparations and pathways to nonrecurrence. BMJ Global Health, 11. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017221. "Because these damages have been inflicted by programmes implemented primarily by the IMF and the World Bank, we suggest these institutions should bear primary responsibility for repair." (p. 5)

SECTION 8:

Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E. T. (2026). Structural adjustment: Damages, reparations and pathways to nonrecurrence. BMJ Global Health, 11. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017221. "In addition to reparations for past and current damages, we argue that the IMF and World Bank must issue a guarantee of non-recurrence, abolishing structural adjustment conditions on all further lending." (p. 5)

2. THE PRE-STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT ERA

[1] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “But the story is wrong. The idea of a natural divide misleads us from the start. In the year 1500, there was no appreciable difference in incomes and living standards between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, we know that people in some regions of the global South were a good deal better off than their counterparts in Europe. And yet their fortunes changed dramatically over the intervening centuries – not in spite of one another but because of one another – as Western powers roped the rest of the world into a single international economic system. When we approach it this way, the question becomes less about the traits of rich countries and poor countries – although that is, of course, part of it – and more about the relationship between them. The divide between rich countries and poor countries isn’t natural or inevitable. It has been created. What could have caused one part of the world to rise and the other to fall? How has the pattern of growth and decline been maintained for more than 500 years? Why is inequality getting worse? And why do we not know about it?”-xviii

[2] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “Point Four was originally articulated for Western audiences – it explained global inequality in a way that absolved Western nations of any culpability. But during the 1950s and 1960s the governments of the United States, Britain and France realised that it could have power beyond their borders as well, and they began to wield it as a weapon in their foreign policy arsenal. They were worried about the progressive ideas that were bubbling up across the global South in the aftermath of colonialism. The leaders of the new independent nations were rejecting Truman’s story about global inequality. Drawing on insights from thinkers such as Karl Marx, Aimé Césaire and Mahatma Gandhi, they pointed out that underdevelopment in the global South was not a natural condition, but a consequence of the way Western powers had organised the world system over hundreds of years. They wanted to change the rules of the global economy to make it fairer for the world’s majority. They wanted to stop foreign states and corporations from plundering their resources, to take control of their own abundant raw materials and to build their own industries without Western interference. In short, they wanted justice – and they saw this as a basic precondition for development.”(p. 21)

[3] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “As far as the Western powers were concerned, this was a dangerous movement that had to be stopped, for it threatened to disrupt their economic dominance. They needed a way to defuse the anger of the people. And they found it in the work of American economist Walt Whitman Rostow. Rostow – an academic who moonlighted as a foreign policy adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower – argued that underdevelopment was not a political problem, but a technical one. It had nothing at all to do with colonialism or Western intervention, but rather to do with internal problems. If poor countries wanted to develop, all they needed to do was accept Western aid and advice, implement free-market policies and follow the West’s path to ‘modernisation’. By telling a story of poverty that focused on domestic policies, Rostow’s theory not only sought to pull people’s attention away from the unfairness of the global economic system, it erased that system from view. Rostow published his theory in 1960 in The Stages of Economic Growth. He advertised the book as a ‘non-communist manifesto’ and it quickly became popular at the highest levels of policy in the US government. During the 1960s and 1970s, the government peddled Rostow’s the” (p. 22)

[4] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “During the 1960s and 1970s, the government peddled Rostow’s theory across the global South as a containment strategy – a way of depoliticising the question of global inequality. It proved to be such a promising tool that President Kennedy hired Rostow into a senior role at the US State Department, and President Johnson later promoted him to national security advisor. Following Truman’s lead, Rostow turned the development story into a public-relations exercise, although this time it was targeted not only at American ears, but also at the rest of the world” (p. 22)

[5] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “However, Rostow’s story failed to work as planned. Across the global South, newly independent countries were ignoring US advice and pursuing their own development agenda, building their economies with protectionist and redistributionist policies – trade tariffs, subsidies and social spending on healthcare and education. And it was working brilliantly. From the 1950s through the 1970s, incomes were growing, poverty rates were falling and the divide between rich and poor countries began to close for the first time in history. And we shouldn’t be surprised; after all, global South countries were using the exact same policies that Western countries had used during their own periods of economic consolidation” (p. 22)

[6] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “The United States, Britain, France and other Western powers were not pleased with these developments. The policies that global South governments were rolling out undermined the profits of Western corporations, their access to cheap labour and resources, and their geopolitical interests.” (p. 22-23)

[7] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “Drawing on Prebisch’s ideas, Latin American governments began to roll out ‘import substitution’ strategies – a bold attempt to industrialise and produce the very commodities they had been made to import from the West at such great expense. They wanted to free themselves from dependency on Western powers. In Argentina, for example, President Juan Perón’s administration (1946–55) invested heavily in infrastructure, nationalised oil resources and built the country’s capacity for heavy industry. It also made substantial investments in public education, healthcare, social security and housing – a programme spearheaded by the president’s wife, the reformer Eva Perón. To this day, the Peróns are celebrated for their largely successful efforts to eradicate poverty, support workers and build Argentina’s middle class.” (p. 96-97)

[8] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “Developmentalism was also taking hold elsewhere in the global South. In much of Africa it appeared in the guise of African socialism, a philosophy that regarded the sharing of economic resources as an important expression of ‘traditional’ African values. The principles of African socialism guided the social justice efforts of countries like Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah and Tanzania under Julius Nyerere. In North Africa and the Middle East, developmentalism took the form of Arab nationalism, as exemplified by leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Baathist parties of Iraq and Syria. In India it took hold under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors. East Asia was busy doing something similar, using infant industry subsidies to build strong businesses in a protected economy, grooming them to the point where they were capable of competing and succeeding against their Western counterparts. All of these strategies relied on relatively high trade tariffs on foreign goods, restrictions on foreign capital flows and limits on foreign ownership of national assets. Land reform was often a central part of the package. And in many cases, governments sought to nationalise natural resources and key industries in order to ensure that their citizens benefited from them as much as possible.” (p. 97)

[9] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “These developmentalist policies mimicked the very same measures that the United States and Europe used to such good effect during their own periods of economic consolidation. And they worked equally well in the global South, delivering high per capita income growth rates of 3.2 per cent during the 1960s and 1970s – double or triple what the West achieved during the Industrial Revolution, and more than six times the growth rate under colonial rule. It was a postcolonial miracle.” (p. 97)

[10] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “In 1960, the average income in the United States was 13.6 times higher than in East Asia. By the end of the 1970s the ratio was down to 10.1, having shrunk by 26 per cent. During the same period, the per capita income ratio between the US and Latin America shrank by 11 per cent, and for the Middle East and North Africa by 23 per cent. The South was steadily closing the divide.” (p. 98)

3. HOW STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT WAS IMPOSED

[11] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “In response, they intervened covertly to overthrow dozens of democratically elected leaders across the South, replacing them with dictators friendly to Western economic interests who were then propped up with aid. For anyone who was paying attention, these coups gave the lie to the story told by figures like Truman and Rostow, and proved the point that the leaders of the global South had been trying to get across all along. Indeed, Western-backed coups were being carried out even as early as the 1950s – including in Iran and Guatemala – while Rostow was busy writing his book. Close as he was to the Eisenhower administration, which perpetrated those first coups, Rostow knew full well what was going on. Indeed, he may have been involved in the US-backed coup against the leader of Brazil in the 1960s, which took place during his tenure in the State Department.” (p. 22-23)

[12] Hickel, J. (2018). The divide: Global inequality from conquest to free markets. W.W. Norton & Company. “Structural adjustment – a form of free-market shock therapy – was sold as a necessary precondition for successful development in the global South. But it ended up doing exactly the opposite. Economies shrank, incomes collapsed, millions of people were dispossessed and poverty rates shot through the roof. Global South countries lost an average of $480 billion per year in potential GDP during the structural adjustment period. It is now widely acknowledged by scholars that structural adjustment was one of the greatest single causes of poverty in the global South, after colonialism. But it proved to be enormously beneficial to the economies of the North.”(p. 23)

[13] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “There has everywhere been an emphatic turn towards neoliberalism in political-economic practices and thinking since the 1970s. Deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision have been all too common. Almost all states, from those newly minted after the collapse of the Soviet Union to old-style social democracies and welfare states such as New Zealand and Sweden, have embraced, sometimes voluntarily and in other instances in response to coercive pressures, some version of neoliberal theory and adjusted at least some policies and practices accordingly. Post-apartheid South Africa quickly embraced neoliberalism, and even contemporary China, as we shall see, appears to be headed in this direction. Furthermore, the advo- cates of the neoliberal way now occupy positions of considerable influence in education (the universities and many ‘think tanks’), in the media, in corporate boardrooms and financial institutions, in key state institutions (treasury departments, the central banks), and also in those international institutions such as the Inter- national Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) that regulate global finance and trade. Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of dis- course. It has pervasive eﬀects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.” (p. 2-3)

[14] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “The Bush administration’s answer to this question was spelled out on 19 September 2003, when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, promulgated four orders that included ‘the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits . . . the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and . . . the elimination of nearly all trade barriers’. The orders were to apply to all areas of the economy, including public services, the media, manufacturing, services, transportation, finance, and construction. Only oil was exempt (presumably because of its special status as revenue producer to pay for the war and its geopolitical significance). The labour market, on the other hand, was to be strictly regulated. Strikes were eﬀectively forbidden in key sectors and the right to unionize restricted. A highly regressive ‘flat tax’ (an ambitious tax- reform plan long advocated for implementation by conservatives in the US) was also imposed.” (p. 6)

[15] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “The coup in Chile and the military takeover in Argentina, pro- moted internally by the upper classes with US support, provided one kind of solution. The subsequent Chilean experiment with neoliberalism demonstrated that the benefits of revived capital accumulation were highly skewed under forced privatization. The country and its ruling elites, along with foreign investors, did extremely well in the early stages. Redistributive eﬀects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, after careful reconstruction of the data, have concluded that neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power. After the implementation of neoliberal policies in the late 1970s, the share of national income of the top 1 per cent of income earners in the US soared, to reach 15 per cent (very close to its pre-Second World War share) by the end of the century. The top 0.1 per cent of income earners in the US increased their share of the national income from 2 per cent in 1978 to over 6 per cent by 1999, while the ratio of the median compensation of workers to the salaries of CEOs increased from just over 30 to 1 in 1970 to nearly 500 to 1 by 2000.” (p. 15-16)

[16] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “This particular prize, though it assumed the aura of Nobel, had nothing to do with the other prizes and was under the tight control of Sweden’s banking elite. Neoliberal theory, particularly in its monetarist guise, began to exert practical influence in a variety of policy fields. During the Carter presidency, for example, deregulation of the economy emerged as one of the answers to the chronic state of stagflation that had prevailed in the US throughout the 1970s. But the dramatic consolidation of neoliberalism as a new economic orthodoxy regulating public policy at the state level in the advanced capitalist world occurred in the United States and Britain in 1979.” (p. 22)

[17] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “This entailed confronting trade union power, attacking all forms of social solidarity that hindered competitive flexibility (such as those expressed through municipal governance, and including the power of many professionals and their associations), dismantling or rolling back the commitments of the welfare state, the privatization of public enterprises (including social housing), reducing taxes, encouraging entrepreneurial initiative, and creating a favourable business climate to induce a strong inflow of foreign investment (particularly from Japan). There was, she famously declared, ‘no such thing as society, only individual men and women’––and, she subsequently added, their families. All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of indi- vidualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values. The ideological assault along these lines that flowed from Thatcher’s rhetoric was relentless. ‘Economics are the method’, she said, ‘but the object is to change the soul.’ And change it she did, though in ways that were by no means comprehensive and complete, let alone free of political costs.” (p. 23)

[18] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “It was in this context that the surplus funds being recycled through the New York investment banks were dispersed through- out the world. Before 1973, most US foreign investment was of the direct sort, mainly concerned with the exploitation of raw material resources (oil, minerals, raw materials, agricultural products) or the cultivation of specific markets (telecommunications, auto- mobiles, etc.) in Europe and Latin America. The New York investment banks had always been active internationally, but after 1973 they became even more so, though now far more focused on lending capital to foreign governments. This required the liberalization of international credit and financial markets, and the US government began actively to promote and support this strategy Freedom’s Just Another Word . . . globally during the 1970s. Hungry for credit, developing countries were encouraged to borrow heavily, though at rates that were advantageous to the New York bankers. Since the loans were designated in US dollars, however, any modest, let alone precipitous, rise in US interest rates could easily push vulnerable countries into default. The New York investment banks would then be exposed to serious losses.” (p. 28-29)

[19] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “The first major test case of this came in the wake of the Volcker shock that drove Mexico into default in 1982–4. The Reagan administration, which had seriously thought of withdrawing sup- port for the IMF in its first year in oﬃce, found a way to put together the powers of the US Treasury and the IMF to resolve the diﬃculty by rolling over the debt, but did so in return for neoliberal reforms. This treatment became standard after what Stiglitz refers to as a ‘purge’ of all Keynesian influences from the IMF in 1982. The IMF and the World Bank thereafter became centres for the propagation and enforcement of ‘free market fundamentalism’ and neoliberal orthodoxy. In return for debt rescheduling, indebted countries were required to implement institutional reforms, such as cuts in welfare expenditures, more flexible labour market laws, and privatization. Thus was ‘structural adjustment’ invented. Mexico was one of the first states drawn into what was going to become a growing column of neoliberal state apparatuses worldwide. What the Mexico case demonstrated, however, was a key diﬀerence between liberal and neoliberal practice: under the former, lenders take the losses that arise from bad investment decisions, while under the latter the borrowers are forced by state and inter- national powers to take on board the cost of debt repayment no matter what the consequences for the livelihood and well-being of the local population. If this required the surrender of assets to foreign companies at fire-sale prices, then so be it. This, it turns out, is not consistent with neoliberal theory. One eﬀect, as Duménil and Lévy show, was to permit US owners of capital to extract high rates of return from the rest of the world during the 1980s and 1990s.” (p. 29)

[20] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “The Labour government could not aﬀord the terms of the settlement and its fiscal diﬃcul- ties mounted. A balance of payments crisis paralleled huge budget deficits. Turning for credits to the IMF in 1975–6, it faced the choice of either submitting to IMF-mandated budgetary restraint and austerity or declaring bankruptcy and sacrificing the integrity of sterling, thus mortally wounding financial interests in the City of London. It chose the former path, and draconian budgetary cutbacks in welfare state expenditures were implemented.” (p. 58)

[21] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “The extraction of tribute via financial mechanisms is an old imperial practice. It has proven very helpful to the restoration of class power, particularly in the world’s main financial centres, and it does not always need a structural adjustment crisis to work. When entrepreneurs in developing countries borrow money from abroad, for example, the requirement that their own state should have suﬃcient foreign exchange reserves to cover their borrowings translates into the state having to invest in, say, US Treasury bonds. The diﬀerence between the interest rate on the money borrowed (for example 12 per cent) and the money deposited as collateral in US Treasuries in Washington (for example 4 per cent) yields a strong net financial flow to the imperial centre at the expense of the developing country. This tendency on the part of the core states like the US to protect financial interests and to stand by as they suck in surpluses from elsewhere both promotes and reflects the consolidation of upper-class power within those states around processes of financialization. But the habit of intervening in the marketplace and bailing out financial institutions when they get into trouble cannot be reconciled with neoliberal theory. Reckless investments should be punished by losses to the lender, but the state makes lenders largely immune to losses. Borrowers have to pay up instead, no matter what the social cost. Neoliberal theory should warn ‘Lender, beware’, but the practice is ‘Borrower, beware’” (p. 74)

[22] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “Thirdly, the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex that came to dominate economic policy in the Clinton years was able to persuade, cajole, and (thanks to structural adjustment programmes administered by the IMF) coerce many developing countries to take the neoliberal road.3 The US also used the carrot of preferential access to its huge consumer market to persuade many countries to reform their economies along neoliberal lines (in some instances through bilateral trade agreements). These policies helped produce a boom in the US in the 1990s. The US, riding a wave of technological innovation that underpinned the rise of a so-called ‘new economy’, looked as if it had the answer and that its policies were worthy of emulation, even though the relatively full employment achieved was at low rates of pay under conditions of diminishing social protections (the number of people without health insurance grew). Flexibility in labour markets and reductions in welfare provision (Clinton’s draconian overhaul of ‘the welfare system as we know it’) began to pay oﬀ for the US and put competitive pressures on the more rigid labour markets that prevailed in most of Europe (with the exception of Britain) and Japan.” (p. 92)

[23] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “Lastly, the global diﬀusion of the new monetarist and neoliberal economic orthodoxy exerted an ever more powerful ideological influence. As early as 1982, Keynesian economics had been purged from the corridors of the IMF and the World Bank. By the end of the decade most economics departments in the US research uni- versities––and these helped train most of the world’s econo- mists––had fallen into line by broadly cleaving to the neoliberal agenda that emphasized the control of inflation and sound public finance (rather than full employment and social protections) as primary goals of economic policy.” (p. 93)

[24] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “As Indonesia’s GDP fell and unemployment surged, the IMF stepped in to mandate austerity by abolishing subsidies on food and kerosene. The riots and violence that followed ‘tore the coun- try’s social fabric’ apart. The capitalist classes, mainly ethnic Chinese, were widely blamed for the debacle. While the wealthiest Chinese business elite decamped to Singapore, a wave of revenge killings and attacks on property engulfed the rest of the Chinese minority, as ethnonationalism reared its ugly head in search of a scapegoat for the social collapse. The standard IMF/US Treasury explanation for the crisis was too much state intervention and corrupt relationships between state and business (‘crony capitalism’). Further neoliberalization was the answer. ” (p. 96-97)

[25] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “Further neoliberalization was the answer. The Treasury and the IMF acted accordingly, with disastrous consequences. The alternative view of the crisis was that impetuous financial deregulation and the failure to construct adequate regulatory controls over unruly and speculative portfolio investments lay at the heart of the problem. The evidence for this latter view is substantial: those countries that had not liberated their capital markets––Singapore, Taiwan, and China––were far less aﬀected than those countries, such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, that had. Furthermore, the one country that ignored the IMF and imposed capital controls–– Malaysia––recovered faster.10 After South Korea likewise rejected IMF advice on industrial and financial restructuring it also staged a faster recovery. ” (p. 97)

[26] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “The strong wave of financialization that set in after 1980 has been marked by its speculative and predatory style. The total daily turnover of financial transactions in inter- national markets, which stood at $2.3 billion in 1983, had risen to $130 billion by 2001. The $40 trillion annual turnover in 2001 compares to the estimated $800 billion that would be required to support international trade and productive invest- ment flows. Deregulation allowed the financial system to become one of the main centres of redistributive activity through speculation, predation, fraud, and thievery. Stock promotions, ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through inflation, asset-stripping through mergers and acquisitions, the promotion of levels of debt incumbency that reduced whole populations, even in the advanced capitalist countries, to debt peonage, to say nothing of corporate fraud, dispossession of assets (the raiding of pension funds and their decimation by stock and corporate collapses) by credit and stock manipulations––all of these became central features of the capitalist financial system. Innumerable ways exist to skim oﬀ values from within the financial system.” (p. 161)

[27] Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001. “US leaders have, with considerable domestic public support, projected upon the world the idea that American neoliberal values of freedom are universal and supreme, and that such values are to die for. The world is in a position to reject that imperialist gesture and refract back into the heartland of neoliberal and neoconservative capitalism a completely diﬀerent set of values: those of an open democracy dedicated to the achievement of social equality coupled with economic, political, and cultural justice. Roosevelt’s arguments are one place to start. Within the US an alliance has to be built to regain popular control of the state apparatus and to thereby advance the deepening rather than the evisceration of democratic practices and values under the juggernaut of market power.” (p. 206)

4. THE DAMAGES: POVERTY, INCOME COLLAPSE, AND HEALTH IMPACTS

[28] Thomson, M., Kentikelenis, A., & Stubbs, T. (2017). Structural adjustment programmes adversely affect vulnerable populations: A systematic-narrative review of their effect on child and maternal health. Public Health Reviews, 38(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40985-017-0063-2. “Specifically, SDG 3.1 aims to reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births, while SDG 3.2 aims for both a neonatal mortality of less than 12 per 1000 live births and an under-5 mortality rate of less than 25 per 1000 live births. Despite significant advances made to meet the preceding Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), efforts fell short of the targeted two-thirds reduction of under-5 mortality and three-quarters reduction of maternal mortality between 1990 and 2015. Estimates in 2015 placed the worldwide infant mortality rate at 32 per 1000 live births, under-5 mortality at 43 per 1000 live births, and maternal mortality at 216 per 100,000 live births. Developing regions accounted for 98.7% of under-5 deaths in 2015, with Sub-Saharan Africa alone bearing 49.6% of the global total. While these indicators have improved rapidly since the 1960s, the pace of improvement decelerated in the 1990s, even as other parts of the world experienced significant gains” (p. 2)

[29] Thomson, M., Kentikelenis, A., & Stubbs, T. (2017). Structural adjustment programmes adversely affect vulnerable populations: A systematic-narrative review of their effect on child and maternal health. Public Health Reviews, 38(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40985-017-0063-2. “The effects of structural adjustment policies on health systems are often indirect. One mechanism by which health systems are indirectly affected is via currency devaluation. Devalued currencies promote export competitiveness, but increase the real cost of im- ports, including pharmaceutical goods and health equipment, which may plausibly have negative implications for child and maternal health outcomes; however, we identified no empirical studies verifying the link. Structural adjustment programmes also promote trade and capital account liberalisation measures, such as the removal of tariffs and capital controls, to encourage growth and foreign direct investment. While tax revenues can increase in the long run if these measures stimulate growth, scholars raise concerns about both the short-run loss of tariff revenue available for healthcare and the long-term repatriation of profits by multinationals receiving tax holidays. One study reports that the mass migration of smallholder farming families to urban areas caused by aggressive trade liberalisation policies was a major contributor to the HIV epidemic in Sub- Saharan Africa. Despite claims by critics to the contrary, IFIs maintain they are not ideologically predisposed to trade liberalisation. Privatisation outside the health sector can have indirect influences on health systems as well. The sale of state-owned enterprises may produce a windfall in the short-term, but the cumulative loss of profits from such businesses reduces government revenues in the mid-term. Accordingly, fewer resources are available to finance healthcare subsidies and services for children and mothers. Privatisation may also result in public sector job loss that is not necessarily substituted by the establishment of new positions in the private sector. For example, more than 150,000 workers were displaced when Ghana privatised 42 of its largest state enterprises between 1984 and 1991. Such unemployment disproportionately affects women, who are likely to be lower skilled and made redundant, which in turn increases commercial sex uptake, and—due to greater risks of contracting STIs—can lead to complications during child birth. In addition, countries receiving structural adjustment loans must devote govern- ment revenue to facilitate debt servicing. Unless protected or substituted via external sources, resources devoted to debt servicing may impinge upon health sector budgets, thereby reducing spending dedicated to improving child and maternal health outcomes . While this association seems plausible, we identified no empirical studies investigating the connection. Finally, structural adjustment programmes can catalyse aid inflows by signalling to donors that a country possesses sound governance and fiscal management. These increased inflows may help to offset negative effects on child and maternal health outcomes by channelling resources back into healthcare provision. Indeed, a doubling of health aid is associated with a 2% reduction in infant mortality rate. However, a re- cent study examining the types of aid catalysed by IFI programmes found no significant effect on health aid inflows. Changes to child and maternal health via effects on social determinants Structural adjustment policies may influence child and maternal health in ways which bypass health systems, and instead act upon the social determinants of health. One example is the increased reliance on unsanitary water accompanying increasing privat- isation and deregulation. Water and sanitation facilities under private ownership may introduce unaffordable fees for water access, leading the poor to rely on water from de- graded sources. Pathogens in such waterways can lead to diarrhoea infections, which disproportionately affect children, while improved water sources and sanitation both improve child mortality by removing exposure to such pathogens. Trade liberalisation and currency devaluation can lead to a rising real price of food, which in turn reduces maternal and child nutritional intake. A World Bank study into the link between commercialisation of agriculture and child malnutrition in Malawi found that children who came from households dependent on cash crop production were more vulnerable to stunting in response to food price shocks than those from less reliant households This implies that dependence on cash crop produc- tion for subsistence magnifies vulnerability to global market conditions, to the detriment of child nutrition. Liberalisation has also been linked to a‘nutrition transition’ owing to the penetration of multinational supermarkets and fast food brands, leading to the double burden of both malnutrition and obesity in the same settings. IFI fiscal consolidation policy justifies short-run economic contraction on the grounds that resolving balance-of-payment issues and transitioning to a model of export- oriented, private sector-led growth will maximise economic growth in the long run. However, increased short-run unemployment may reduce income available to pay for healthcare even as privatisation and user fees increase the cost of services. Moreover, IFIs may miscalculate the duration and depth of fiscal contraction. The IMF’ s own Independent Evaluation Office noted a“tendency to adopt fiscal targets based on over-optimistic assumptions about the pace of economic recovery”, thus multiplying the negative impact of economic contraction. Further, the ubiquity of export-led growth strategies worldwide as per the Washington Consensus may constitute a fallacy of composition, in that it necessarily depends on regional trade partners running trade deficits. Finally, structural adjustment affects broader psychosocial dynamics. For instance, changes to social and labour policies can heighten psychosocial stress, with implications on health outcomes, including child and maternal health; or, alternately, prompt greater social cohesion as communities work to overcome adversity . Adjustment policy may also provoke social unrest, thereby exacerbating existing social, economic and health problems.” (p. 12-14)

[30] Thomson, M., Kentikelenis, A., & Stubbs, T. (2017). Structural adjustment programmes adversely affect vulnerable populations: A systematic-narrative review of their effect on child and maternal health. Public Health Reviews, 38(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40985-017-0063-2. “IFIs have an obligation to ensure that universally agreed goals—like the SDGs—are an integral part of all policy efforts. Our review suggests that, in their current form, structural adjustment programmes are incongruous with achieving SDGs 3.1 and 3.2, which stipulate reductions in neonatal, under-5, and maternal mortality rates. It is tell- ing that even the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office, in assessing the performance of structural adjustment loans, noted that“outcomes such as maternal and infant mortality rates have generally not improved” [81]. From a public health perspective, this admission—in tandem with existing evidence—warrants a fundamental rethinking to the ways in which adjustment loans operate. Social goals are currently side-lined to fis- cal targets, while detrimental effects are insufficiently acknowledged [22-27; 84]. The mechanisms identified in this review should serve as a guide for recalibrating structural adjustment programmes to protect children and mothers.” (p. 14-15)

[31] Pollin, R. (2003). Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. “Even though neoliberal policies have generated a decline in the developing countries’ average growth rate, this does not mean that these countries have necessarily become worse off relative to the wealthier countries. This would obviously depend on the growth experience in the wealthy countries as well. In fact, however, as we see in the upper panel of Table 5.2, growth in the developing countries has indeed been slower than in the wealthy countries during the neoliberal era, despite the declining growth in the wealthy countries themselves. The table reports the same growth rates on a per capita basis for developing countries, excluding China, that we saw in Table 5.1, now alongside the comparable per capita growth figures for what the World Bank calls the “high income OECD countries,” which basically includes North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia. As the table shows, the difference in the per capita growth rates between the wealthy OECD and developing countries was, on average, only 0.3 percent per year during 1961-80. But this annual differential rises to 1.3 percent during the neoliberal era - that is, an increase in the average growth differential between the wealthy and developing regions of more than 300 percent between the two periods.” (p. 131-133)

[32] Pollin, R. (2003). Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. “The first has been the overall decline in economic growth and average incomes in most developing countries in the neoliberal era. As income growth fell, so did the expansion of domestic markets, and thus also the expansion of jobs producing goods for domestic consumers. But what about the sharp rise in manufacturing exports by developing countries? In fact, even this development has not generally translated into a comparable rise in jobs producing goods for export markets (with some important exceptions, notably China again, but also Malaysia and Chile). Many of the countries that are now manufacturing exporters - in particular the large Latin American economies, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil - did already have large-scale manufacturing sectors in operation, though these earlier-vintage manufacturing sectors, under the import substitution model, concentrated on producing for their domestic markets. The liberalization of trade policies has therefore produced improvements in their exporting capacity, but, concurrently, a corresponding increase in the penetration of their own domestic markets by foreign imports. Moreover, firms in the relatively new export manufacturing countries have been forced to appropriate higher productivity production methods in order to compete in the global market. This has made their operations more efficient, but has also entailed reducing the number of workers they employ. Workers in developing countries thus face a double squeeze: diminishing opportunities to continue earning a living in agriculture, but nothing close to a compensating growth of job opportunities outside of agriculture. These are the circumstances that have pushed more working people in developing countries into a desperate situation where they must accept a sweatshop job to continue to live. But this situation can hardly be construed as “tremendous good news for the world’s poor,” as Paul Krugman put it. They are simply the raw facts of life for hundreds of millions of people under global neoliberalism.” (p. 158-159)

[33] Pollin, R. (2003). Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. “The U.N. Conference on Financing for Development was also clear that “a crucial task” for meeting its poverty reduction goals is “to enhance the efficiency, coherence, and consistency of macroeconomic policies.”34 But the official conference document provides no specifics as to what should constitute such “efficient, coherent, and consistent” macroeconomic policies. As a simple starting point for addressing this issue, what if we allowed that the developing countries were able to return to something like their average rate of economic growth during the era of developmental states? As we have seen earlier (see Table 5.1), the less developed countries (excluding China) grew at an average annual rate of 5.5 percent between 1961-80 but this rate dropped to 2.6 percent between 1981-99. The decline in the average growth rate for less developed countries was therefore 2.9 percent per year during the neoliberal era. To give a rough estimate of how important such a shift in their growth path would be for the less developed countries, I have estimated the effects of raising the average growth rate for these countries by 2.9 percent per year over the years 1995-99 only. The specific question we are asking is: if the poor and middle income countries grew from 1995-99 at an average rate that was 2.9 percent faster than the rate at which they actually grew, how much additional national income would they have generated? The answer is that, for the full five-year period, the poor and middle- income countries, exclusive of China, would have produced an additional $2.4 trillion in income. The average total income increase over the five-year period would therefore be $480 billion per year - that is, an amount that is nearly five times larger than what would be generated by an implausible outer limit increase of $105 billion in foreign aid. It is important to emphasize that this result does not rely on assuming that the less-developed countries achieve anything unprecedented in their growth performance, but simply that they return to their average rates of growth during the era of developmental states. In other words, if the less developed countries abandoned the neoliberal policies that have inhibited their growth for the past generation, and established a new policy environment that promoted growth to an extent comparable to the levels they achieved in the 1960s and 1970s - but to no more than the average levels of this earlier period - they would have generated by 1999 gains in national income nearly five times larger than what they would attain by even an implausibly generous increase in aid from the wealthy countries.” (p. 165-166)

[34] Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2002). Age of reverse aid: Neo-liberalism as catalyst of regression. Development and Change, 33(2), 281–293. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7660.00257. “Table 1. Share of Wages in National Incomes, Selected Countries Latin America (percentages). Latin America (average): –8 percentage points (1980s–1990s), Mexico: –10.6 percentage points (1980s alone), Chile: –24.4 percentage points, Ecuador: –18.8 percentage points.” (p. 287)

[35] Stubbs, T., Kentikelenis, A., Ray, R., et al. (2022). Poverty, Inequality, and the International Monetary Fund: How Austerity Hurts the Poor and Widens Inequality. Journal of Globalization and Development, 13(1), 61–89. “This article incorporated new data on the intensity of fiscal adjustment to examine the effects of IMF austerity on poverty and inequality. In so doing, we overcame limitations of earlier studies that treat the extent of fiscal consolidation required from programs as homogenous. We used a dataset of up to 79 countries observed in the period from 2002 to 2018 and deployed an appropriate econometric strategy to find that greater austerity leads to greater income inequality and higher poverty. Probing this relationship further, we found that the effect on inequality is exerted for up to two years, and is driven by concentrating income into the top 10% of earners. For poverty, the effect is apparent across multiple poverty headcount measures—on the World Bank’s $1.44 and GCIP’s $1.86, $1.90, and $2.50 measures —and one of our two poverty gap measures—at $3.20. Confidence in our findings was bolstered by the fact that our results were consistent across a range of different models estimated in robustness checks.” (p. 83)

[36] Handa, S., & King, D. (2003). Adjustment with a human face? Evidence from Jamaica. World Development, 31(7), 1125–1145. “The results of the analysis show that despite JamaicaÕs very high level of human develop- ment relative to other countries with the same level of per capita income, the z-score of weight for height of preschool children fell by 0.178 z- scores in the months immediately after the de- valuation; the drop in weight was especially great among urban children. The results also indicate a very strong relationship between child weight, exchange rate devaluation, and food price inflation. The estimated point elas- ticityofthez-scorewith respect to the exchange rate and food price inflation is )0.36 and )0.86, respectively, and the short-run food price elasticity during the liberalization rose to)1.24. This strong link between currency depreciation, inflation, and child welfare, illustrate the political and economic sensitivity of the exchange rate in open economies such as Jamaica, with clear implications for the timing and manner in which SAP reforms should be implemented.” (p. 1126)

[37] Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E. T. (2026). Structural adjustment: Damages, reparations and pathways to nonrecurrence. BMJ Global Health, 11. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017221. “Figure 3 (source: World Bank Data, original analysis)” (p. 4)

5. WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN DONE?

[38] Sullivan, D., & Hickel, J. (2022, December 22). 16 million and counting: The collateral damage of capital. New Internationalist. “Countless studies have demonstrated the human toll of neoliberal policy, but one way to illustrate the extraordinary scale of it is to compare the death rate from malnutrition in Cuba to countries that have either dismantled or prevented progressive food policies. The map shows the number of deaths from malnutrition in excess of Cuban levels, in all countries from 1990 to 2019.1 Countries shaded in light yellow had a mortality rate from malnutrition equal to or lower than Cuba’s. In total, 15.63 million excess deaths have occurred due to malnutrition that could have been prevented with Cuba-style policies. This includes 35,000 in the US; 409,000 in Mexico; 729,000 in China; 1.2 million in Indonesia; and a staggering 3.65 million in India. The only large populous region left unscathed was Eastern Europe and Russia, perhaps reflecting its history of socialist policy. In the rest of the world, almost 16 million people have died needlessly. These deaths are not incidental to the capitalist world-system; they are intrinsic to it.”

[39] Sullivan, D., & Hickel, J. (2022, December 22). 16 million and counting: The collateral damage of capital. New Internationalist. “Cuba’s food provisioning system has been remarkably successful at fighting hunger and premature mortality. Figure 1 compares Cuba’s death rate from nutritional deficiencies to three Latin American states with similar incomes: Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. This data was obtained from the Global Burden of Disease Study (2019), carried out by Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. It refers to all deaths associated with inadequate food, including deficiencies in calories, protein, iodine, vitamin A, iron and other nutrients. The data is age-standardized – a technique used when populations have different age profiles – to allow for comparisons between countries and across time. Even though Cuba has a lower per capita income than all these states, it has performed much better at ensuring access to essential goods required for survival. In fact, Cuba’s death rate from malnutrition is lower than even high- income economies like Chile, the US and France (Figure 1). The US’s per capita income is almost nine times higher than Cuba’s, yet its citizens are more likely to die from lack of calories and protein. Remarkably, Cuba has been able to accomplish this while subject to a brutal economic blockade imposed by the US.”

[40] Sullivan, D., & Hickel, J. (2022, December 22). 16 million and counting: The collateral damage of capital. New Internationalist. “It is clear that neoliberal policy has failed to achieve food security and human development for the Majority World. Cuba has demonstrated that a more effective approach is to organize production directly around meeting human needs, through public provisioning and social guarantees. But it’s not just Cuba. Public provisioning systems have proved to be a powerful tool for poverty alleviation in many contexts. One 1986 study of health and education indicators found that at any given level of economic development, socialist countries performed better than capitalist states at securing strong welfare outcomes for their populations. These findings received further support from a 1993 study in the International Journal of Health Services, which found that high levels of democracy and strong leftwing policies were associated with improved health indicators. The public health researcher Vicente Navarro reached similar conclusions in his region- by-region survey of health outcomes in capitalist and socialist states. In Latin America, Cuba performed better than most other states; in Asia, China and the Soviet Union had stronger welfare outcomes than capitalist economies like India or Turkey; and in the high-income countries of Europe and North America, the social democracies with generous welfare states, including Sweden, Norway and Denmark, outperformed neoliberal states like the US. As the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen remarked in 1981, ‘One thought that is bound to occur is that communism is good for poverty removal.’”

[41] Sullivan, D., & Hickel, J. (2022, December 22). 16 million and counting: The collateral damage of capital. New Internationalist. “The mass poverty and hunger that characterizes our world today is not due to absolute scarcity. The world economy has extraordinary productive capacity, sufficient to end poverty several times over. The problem is that this capacity is overwhelmingly used to service the interests of capital accumulation, rather than to meet human needs. With democratic socialist policy, we can do the opposite: we can build an economy focused on people instead of profit, where the goal of production is to ensure that everyone has the goods and services necessary to live decent, dignified lives.”

[42] Martinez Franzoni, J. (2016). The quest for universal social policy in the south: Actors, ideas and architectures. Cambridge University Press. — for the Costa Rica and South Korea counterfactuals. “Table 3.1 Human Development Indicators, 2012 Country, Life Expectancy at Birth (2012): Costa Rica, 79.3; South Korea, 81.1; Uruguay, 77.0; Mauritius, 73.2 ; Upper-middle income average, ~~74; World average,~~ 71” (p. 54)

6. UNEQUAL EXCHANGE, AID AND THE SCALE OF LOSS

[43] Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., & Zoomkawala, H. (2021). Plunder in the post-colonial era: Quantifying drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1960–2018. New Political Economy, 26(6), 1030–1047. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2021.1899153

“The general logic of colonisation was to integrate the global South into the Europe-centered world economy on unequal terms. The South (the ‘periphery’) was made to serve as a source of cheap labour and raw materials for the North (the ‘core’), and as a captive market for Northern manufactured goods (Davis 2002; Chang 2008). Beginning in the 1950s, economists and historians associated with dependency theory and world-systems theory argued that this relationship continues to define the global economy in the post-colonial era (Rodney 1972; Prebisch 1950; Galeano 1973; Wallerstein 1974; Frank 1967; Nkrumah 1965). Recent empirical data confirms that high-income nations continue to rely on a large net appropriation of labour and resources from the rest of the world. In 2015, this amounted to 10.1 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents (accounting for 50% of total consumption in high-income nations), and 182 million person‑years of embodied labour (28% of their total consumption) from low- and middle-income nations (Dorninger et al. 2021). Note that these figures represent resources and labour embodied not only in primary commodities but also in high-technology industrial goods such as iPhones, computer chips, cars, designer clothes, etc., which over the past few decades have come to be overwhelmingly produced in the South. This net appropriation occurs because prices are systematically lower in the South than in the North. For instance, wages paid to workers in the South are on average one‑fifth the level of Northern wages (Cope 2019, p. 80). This means that for every unit of embodied labour and resources the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units to pay for it. This pattern was first described by Adam Smith ([1776] 1981, p. 141–145), Karl Marx ([1894] 1991, p. 344–346) and Dadabhai Naoroji (1902). It was theorised more fully by Arghiri Emmanuel (1972), Samir Amin (1976) and Stephen Bunker (1985) as a process of ‘unequal exchange’, which constitutes a ‘hidden transfer of value’ from South to North. ” (p. 2)

[44] Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., & Zoomkawala, H. (2021). Plunder in the post-colonial era: Quantifying drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1960–2018. New Political Economy, 26(6), 1030–1047. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2021.1899153

“Theorists of unequal exchange argue that global price inequalities are artefacts of historical and contemporary forces that depress the cost of labour and resources in the South. During the colonial period, dispossession and the destruction of subsistence economies created a surplus of unemployed labour (Davis 2002; Patnaik and Patnaik 2017; Dunaway 2010). Following independence, when Southern governments attempted to improve wages and resource prices, Western powers often intervened to remove them from power, as in the Republic of Congo (1960), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973) (Hickel 2017: ch. 4). In the contemporary era, subsidised grain exports from the North, and land grabs by multinational companies, continue to undermine subsistence economies, placing downward pressure on wages (McMichael 2014; Pearce 2012). Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) imposed on the South by the IMF and World Bank have cut public sector wages and employment, while rolling back labour rights and curtailing unions (Khor 1995; Petras and Veltmeyer 2002). Finally, the South’s dependence on external finance means that Southern governments must compete with one another to offer cheaper wages and resources to attract foreign investment (Hickel 2017: ch. 6). Low wages are ultimately maintained through militarised borders, which preclude easy migration from South to North, and thus prevent international wage convergence.” (p. 2-3)

[45] Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., & Zoomkawala, H. (2021). Plunder in the post-colonial era: Quantifying drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1960–2018. New Political Economy, 26(6), 1030–1047. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2021.1899153

“The deployment of geopolitical and monopoly power by Northern states and corporations main- tains price differentials that enable them to appropriate labour and resources from the South through international trade. This pattern sustains high levels of income in the global North, and preserves levels of material consumption well above equitable and ecologically sustainable levels (O’Neill et al 2018). At the same time, it depresses the South’s potential trade revenues, denying them access to resources that could be used for investment in public services, economic develop- ment and poverty reduction. In light of this, one might ask how much the South has been losing (and the North gaining) as a consequence of this relationship. Several attempts have been made to estimate the scale of the South’s losses through unequal exchange. Samir Amin (1976, p. 144) calculated that‘if the rewards of labor were equivalent to what they are at the center, with the same productivity,’ the South’s revenues from exports to the North would have been $152 billion higher in 1966 (updated to constant 2011 dollars). This method has been improved upon by Zak Cope (2019, p. 81), who devised a way to distinguish between losses the South su ers due to the‘undervaluation’ of their exports (comparing the South’s wages to global average wages), and losses they suffer due to the‘overvaluation’ of imports (comparing the North’s wages to global average wages). He finds that in 2010, the South lost $2.8 trillion in hidden value appropriated by the North.” (p. 3)

[46] Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., & Zoomkawala, H. (2021). Plunder in the post-colonial era: Quantifying drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1960–2018. New Political Economy, 26(6), 1030–1047. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2021.1899153

“The utility of this approach is that it allows us to meaningfully compare value transfer to the South’s GDP in MER, and to any other financial stocks or flows measured in terms of market dollars. For instance, in recent years, the South has suffered annual losses of $1.4 trillion through unequal exchange, $486 billion through pro t repatriation (Griffiths 2014), and $1.1 trillion through illicit financial flows (Kar and Spanjers 2015), which together sum to $3 trillion (note however that Griffiths (2014) uses somewhat different country groupings, so is not directly comparable). This approach also allows us to make meaningful comparisons with ODA. The original method yields results that can be compared with ODA from the perspective of the North (i.e. seeing ODA as a cost to the North), in the sense that the North saves through unequal exchange a sum that’s many times more than it gives out in aid. But from the perspective of the South, this modi ed method works better, because ODA receipts are subject to the global price level. So, over the past few years the South has lost around $1.4 trillion per year in unequal exchange, while receiving around $100 billion per year in aid. In other words, for every $1 the South receives in aid it loses $14 through unequal exchange (or $30, if we include losses due to pro t repatriation and illicit financial outflows).” (p. 11)

[47] Hickel J, Dorninger C, Wieland H, et al. Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990-2015. Glob Environ Change 2022;73:102467. “Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.” (p. 1)

[48] Hickel J, Sullivan D. How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis. World Dev. Perspect. 2024;35:100612. “Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the levels of GDP per

capita that currently characterise high-income countries. However, this would require increasing total global output and resource use several times over, dramatically exacerbating ecological breakdown. Furthermore, universal convergence along these lines is unlikely within the imperialist structure of the existing world economy. Here we demonstrate that this dilemma can be resolved with a different approach, rooted in recent needs-based analyses of poverty and development. Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production should be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries. With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large increases in total global throughput and output. Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to provision public services, to deploy efficient technology, and to build sovereign industrial capacity in the global South.” (p. 1)

+ See Previous Unequal Exchange Video

7. POSSIBILITIES FOR REPARATIONS

[49] Bretton Woods Project. (2019, October 3). Tunisia Commission seeks reparations for human rights violations from IMF and World Bank. https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2019/10/tunisia-commission-seeks-reparations-for-human-rights-violations-from-imf-and-world-bank/

“Tunisian victims of human rights violations. The Commission claimed that the IMF and World Bank bear “a share of responsibility” in social unrest linked to structural adjustment policies. The Commission was established in 2013 by then-President Moncef Marzouki following the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, with the purpose of investigating gross human rights violations committed by the Tunisian State since 1955 and to provide compensation and rehabilitation to victims.”

[50] Bretton Woods Project. (2019, October 3). Tunisia Commission seeks reparations for human rights violations from IMF and World Bank. https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2019/10/tunisia-commission-seeks-reparations-for-human-rights-violations-from-imf-and-world-bank/

“The Commission found that, not only was the Tunisian state responsible for these serious human rights violations, but also the World Bank and IMF, which, “through loan conditions and structural adjustment plans imposed inappropriate policies that were at the root of the serious violations that followed the popular uprisings.” The Commission called for three acts of reparation: apology, financial compensation to victims, and cancellation of Tunisia’s multilateral debt to these institutions. Tunisia is currently close to closing its four-year $2.8 billion IMF loan programme agreed in 2016, which once again has been accused of imposing generic recommendations, “without considering the consequences on social stability and cohesion””

[51] Sullivan D, Hickel J, Arellano J, et al. Global economic governance. Global Inequality Project; 2025. “The US has de facto veto power over all significant decisions, and together with the rest of the Global North controls well over half of the vote in both agencies. Middle- and low- income countries, which together constitute 85 percent of the world’s population, have a minority share.”

[52] Sullivan D, Hickel J, Arellano J, et al. Global economic governance. Global Inequality Project; 2025. “In per capita terms, the inequalities are truly extreme. For every vote that the average person in the global North has, the average person in the global South has less than one-eighth of a vote. In the World Bank, a person from China has less than 1/20th of a vote. There is a clear racial imbalance at play here: on average, the votes of people of colour are worth only a fraction of their counterparts.”

[53] Sullivan D, Hickel J, Arellano J, et al. Global economic governance. Global Inequality Project; 2025. “Similar inequalities are evident in the World Trade Organization (WTO), which was founded in the mid-1990s. The WTO is formally governed by a one-country, one-vote system. But bargaining power is ultimately determined by market size. If we measure market size with GDP, we see that the global North holds nearly 60% of the bargaining power in the WTO.”

[54] Reinsberg B, Abouharb MR. Partisanship, protection, and punishment: how governments affect the distributional consequences of International Monetary Fund programs. Rev Int Polit Econ. 2023;30(5):1851-79. "We argue that governments allocate adjustment burdens strategically to protect their own partisan supporters while seeking to impose adjustment costs upon the partisan supporters of their opponents." (p. 1851) Reinsberg B, Abouharb MR. Partisanship, protection, and punishment: how governments affect the distributional consequences of International Monetary Fund programs. Rev Int Polit Econ. 2023;30(5):1851-79. "Against this background, we turn to the individual perceptions and experiences of the distributional effects of IMF programs in developing countries. We argue that governments use their discretion within such programs to favor individuals and groups aligned to them to the detriment of those individuals and groups whose allegiances lay elsewhere. Facing pressures to comply with IMF-mandated reforms, we expect governments to engage in more intensive distributional politics than they would otherwise do. They will lump adjustment burdens such as civil-service retrenchment, tax hikes, and spending cuts on opposition supporters while seeking to protect their own supporters as much as possible. As a result of such distributional politics, we expect to find highly unequal perceptions and experiences of the same country-level IMF program." (p. 1852) Reinsberg B, Abouharb MR. Partisanship, protection, and punishment: how governments affect the distributional consequences of International Monetary Fund programs. Rev Int Polit Econ. 2023;30(5):1851-79. "Rawlings utilized the IMF-mandated divestiture process—the transfer of SOEs into private hands—for political gain, through a variety of questionable practices (Appiah-Kubi, 2001). For example, the Divestiture Implementation Committee (DIC), the government agency created to handle the process, never publicized the initial divestiture transactions—interested parties were simply requested to contact the DIC or the relevant sector ministry. Appiah-Kubi (2001, p. 224) notes that this lack of transparency led to widespread allegations of opportunistic behavior by bureaucrats and top government executives eager to cream off sizeable rents from their control of SOEs’ The period 1989–1999 saw over 70% of Ghana’s SOEs privatized (ibid: 211). Between 1991–1998, divestiture receipts on average accounted for 8.5% of total government revenue (ibid: 216). While this revenue stabilized the Ghanaian economy, it also allowed the government to stabilize taxes and helped Rawlings maintain partisan support. As Appiah-Kubi (2001, p. 217) describes: the forgoing of tax increases provided a‘congenial sociopolitical atmosphere that paved the way for the smooth transition from military rule to democratic multi-party governance’." (p. 1859)

[55] Richardson ET, Malik MM, Darity WA, et al. Reparations for Black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S. and their potential impact on SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Soc Sci Med. 2021;276:113741. "Potential mechanisms by which reparations — through both monetary compensation and acknowledgment of injustice — could have suppressed the COVID- 19 pandemic include: 1) narrowing of the path-dependent racial wealth divide; 2) changes in the built environment, fostering the ability to social distance; 3) spreading out of front-line work across racial groups; 4) decreased race-based allostatic load."

8. DEMANDS FOR NON-RECURRENCE

[56] Vazquez, A. (2017). Is the BRICS New Development Bank a fledgling alternative to the World Bank? BRICS Law Journal, 4(3), 6–34. “In 2013, the efforts of BriCS had developed sufficiently along the institutional pathway: due to the 2008 crisis and little coordinated response from the G20, BriCS made a clear case for a new institution to be created. This institution was meant be a complement to, not a substitute for, existing financial institutions both in the public and in the private sector. Its existence would strengthen the voices of emerging and developing economies in the development financial architecture as those would be the major contributors to fund the project. In this context, it was observed with amazement that in March 2013 the leaders of the BriCS countries (now including South Africa) approved the creation of a new development bank to finance investment in infrastructure and more sustainable development in BriCS and other emerging and developing countries. This was the first time since Bretton Woods that the world financial architecture was designed again from the common will of major states, and two major world institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – were being seriously challenged.” (p. 10)

[57] Vazquez, A. (2017). Is the BRICS New Development Bank a fledgling alternative to the World Bank? BRICS Law Journal, 4(3), 6–34. “The creation of the latest development bank by the five big emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was welcomed, but raised critical questions by recalling heterogeneous experiences with development banks around the world. While the BriCS countries have in principle agreed to create a development bank to provide initial funding for infrastructure projects worth us$4.5 trillion, this alternative to Western-dominated financial institutions is still fruitless. Many countries around the globe – and especially its founding members – expect it to work in order to meet massive infrastructure needs that have been left unattended by the traditional institutions.” (p. 32)

[58] Daoud, A., Herlitz, A., & Subramanian, S. V. (2022). IMF fairness: Calibrating the policies of the International Monetary Fund based on distributive justice. World Development, 157, 105924. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105924. “The International Monetary Fund (IMF) provides financial assistance to its member countries in economic difficulties but at the same time requires these countries to reform public policies. In several contexts, these reforms have been at odds with population health and material living standards. While researchers have empirically analyzed the consequences of IMF reforms on health, no analysis has yet identified under what conditions tradeoffs between consequences for populations and economic outcomes would be fair and acceptable. Our article analyzes and identifies five principles to govern such tradeoffs and thus define IMF fairness. The article first reviews existing policy-evaluation studies, which on balance show that IMF policies, in their pursuit of macroeconomic improvement, frequently produce adverse effects on children’s health and material living standards. Secondly, the article discusses four theories from distributive ethics—maximization, egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism—to identify which is most compatible with the IMF’s core mission of improving macroeconomic conditions, while at the same time balancing the consequences for population outcomes. Using a distributive justice analysis of IMF policies, we argue that sufficientarianism constitutes the most compatible theory. Thirdly, the arti- cle formalizes IMF fairness in the language of causal inference. It also supplies a framework for empiri- cally measuring the extent to which IMF policies fulfill the criteria of IMF fairness, using observational data.” (p. 1)

Comments (5)

Amro · August 19, 2026

Thank you, comrade habibi Hakim, sir. You are the best of men.

1(one) Andrei Filip · August 19, 2026

I was just talking to my wife yesterday about the beautiful bois, and how part of their trustworthyness is being so forthcoming with sources and the universal logic they use to interpret them, and she rightly argued that trust should be checked periodically to avoid becoming someone who just blindly listens to talking heads (heh) So I told her about the Hakim sources appetizers before any post and told her I'd show her the next one and we could go through it. Couldn't have picked a better time...

Hakim · August 19, 2026

This is very cute hahaha I hope my sourcing is up to par in that case.

Shahab Zakikhani · August 19, 2026

finally another hakim post. felt like a year.

Mishu2308 · August 19, 2026

Brother really left the wall of text meme irl 💀💀💀💀