Ecologically Unequal Trade: Rich WEIRD countries drained 152 Trillion dollars from Global South since 1960

 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.

 https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/6/rich-countries-drained-152tn-from-the-global-south-since-1960

 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.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800920300938 

 By comparing the monetary exchange value of resources embodied in trade, we find significant international disparities in how resource provision is compensated. Value added per ton of raw material embodied in exports is 11 times higher in high-income countries than in those with the lowest income, and 28 times higher per unit of embodied labor. With the exception of embodied land for China and India, all other world regions serve as net exporters of all types of embodied resources to high-income countries across the 1990–2015 time period. On aggregate, ecologically unequal exchange allows high-income countries to simultaneously appropriate resources and to generate a monetary surplus through international trade.

  the theory of ecologically unequal exchange explicitly considers material aspects of international trade and postulates that there are asymmetric net transfers of resources (including labor) from peripheral to core areas of the global economic system (Hornborg, 2019, Hornborg, 2014, Hornborg, 1998). The exclusive focus on monetary flows implies a disregard for these potentially unequal transfers of biophysical resources, such as materials, energy, land, and labor, embodied in commodities and services traded between regions with differing economic ‘power’. The theory argues that such asymmetric resource flows are crucial for the capacity of cities, nations, and regions to accumulate

 Our analysis includes 170 countries, encompassing 99.2% of the world population in 2015, and the bulk of global supply chains and economy-wide resource flows. 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2021.1899153?journalCode=cnpe20 

 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, drain from the South totalled $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), or

$152 trillion when accounting for lost growth.

 For instance, we assume that if the South’s 1961 losses ($29.7 billion) were invested in Southern development in 1962, they would have grown at the South’s 1962 growth rate (6%), yielding a total of $31 billion at year’s end. In 1963, the South would then be able to re-invest this $31 billion plus the scale of value transfer in 1962 ($25 billion), with this entire sum growing by the 1963 growth rate (7%). Our calculations here include years of negative returns

  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.