"For most of history, things were much more equal. 200 years ago, rich countries were only 3 times richer than poor countries. By the end of colonialism in the 1960s, they were 35 times richer. Today, they’re about 80 times richer. Rich countries try to compensate for this by giving aid to poor countries about 130 billion dollars each year. That’s a lot of money. So then why does the wealth gap keep getting bigger? One reason I found is that large corporations are taking more than 900 billion dollars out of poor countries each year through a form of tax avoidance called trade mispricing. On top of this, each year poor countries are paying about 600 billion dollars in debt service to rich countries, on loans that have already been paid off many times over. And then there’s the money that poor countries lose from trade rules imposed by rich countries to get access to more resources and cheaper labor. Economists from the University of Massachusetts calculate that this costs poor countries about 500 billion dollars a year. All together, that’s more than 2 trillion dollars that flows from some of the poorest parts of the world to the richest, every year. Rich governments like to say they’re helping poor countries develop, but who’s developing who here? "
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 05:06:09 +0000
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