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http://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v13/2/imf.html

According to Jack Welsh, CEO of GE, he and GE’s shareholders would be best served if factories were on barges so that when workers demand higher wages and better working conditions, the barges could easily be moved to a country with more compliant workers.

100 countries have undergone grave economic decline over the past three decades. Per capita income in these 100 countries is now lower than it was 10, 15, 20 or in some cases even 30 years ago. In Africa, the average household consumes 20 percent less today than it did 25 years ago. Worldwide, more than 1 billion people saw their real incomes fall during the period 1980-1993. Meanwhile, according to the United Nations Development Program’s 1998 Human Development Report, the 15 richest people in the world enjoy combined assets that exceed the total annual gross domestic product of sub-Saharan Africa. At the end of the 1990’s, the wealth of the three richest individuals on earth surpassed the combined annual GDP of the 48 least developed countries.

While the World Bank publicly emphasizes that it aims to alleviate poverty in the world, imperialistic attitudes occasionally emerge from its leading figures. In 1991, then chief economist Lawrence Summers (now US Secretary of the Treasury) wrote in an internal memo that was leaked:

Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]? ... The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that ... Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City .... The concern over an agent that causes a one-in-a-million chance in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand.

As Prof. Chomsky often says, the debt crisis is an ideological construct. In a true capitalist society, the third world debt would be wiped out. The Banks who made the risky loans would have to accept the losses, and the dictators and their entourage would have to repay the money they embezzled. The power structure in society however, prevents this from happening. In the west tax payers end up assuming the risk while the large banks run off with the high profits often derived from high risk loans. In the third world, the people end up paying the costs while their elites retire in the French Riviera.
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http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa092.html

World Bank money probably has made its biggest impression in Africa. Between 1973 and 1980, the bank plowed $2.4 billion into African agriculture.[38] For almost 15 years, the bank has concentrated on boosting food production; in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, 92 percent of its projects were designed to increase food production.[39] Yet per capita food production in Africa has fallen by almost 20 percent since 1960.[40]

The bank's handouts to governments for agricultural projects often work out badly. One of the bank's West African projects to promote coffee and cacao production failed partly because of "soil unsuitability."[43] The bank encouraged farmers to grow crops that were unsuited for their soil. With friends like the World Bank, African farmers don't need enemies.

Poor investments financed by the World Bank not only waste money themselves but have also dragged down entire economies. A confidential 1986 bank report quoted a Kenyan government report: "Troubled investments have required an inordinate amount of the time of government administrators, managers and policymakers, hence diverting their attention from the more basic development needs of the nation."[55] The bank report noted, "Kenya is another country suffering from having accepted many offers of foreign assistance not well suited to its needs. The recurrent costs of efficiently maintaining and operating projects constructed with donor assistance are beyond the budget capacity of central and local governments."[56]

Even though bank studies and spokesmen repeatedly insist that the private sector is inherently more efficient than the public sector, the majority of bank lending is still going into shoring up floundering state-owned enterprises, government credit institutions, and political and bureaucratic control of the economy. Consider a few examples:

-- A 1986 $12.7 million grant to Rwanda to, among other things, strengthen the government's management of the agricultural sector. [57]

-- A 1986 $10 million grant to Zambia to bolster the government's fertilizer monopoly.[58]

-- A 1987 structural adjustment loan to Senegal to encourage public-sector reform and increase tax collection.[59]

-- A 1987 grant to Sudan to reform state-owned enterprises.[60]

-- A 1987 $34 million loan to the government of Jamaica to "assist in the creation of a financially self-sufficient sugar industry capable of meeting the demands of the export markets in the EC and the U.S. and the domestic market."[61]

The Jamaican sugar industry has for years been the victim of gross mismanagement and is incapable even of meeting the island's own demands for sugar. The bank has supported Jamaica's sugar industry since 1978. A recent World Bank press release claimed, "Since the early 1980s, the government has been implementing a major rationalization of the state-owned sugar industry as part of its broader economic adjustment effort in order to make it financially viable." Yet a 1985 confidential bank report concluded, "Despite major effort, little progress has been made at improving management of the government's sugar estates."[62] The industry is still heavily politicized and effectively controlled by the sugar workers' unions.

Since 1983, the bank has claimed that it has successfully encouraged policy reforms among borrowers. At the 1984 annual meeting, bank president A. W. Clausen proclaimed that "an increasing number of nations . . . have embarked on the tough policy reforms necessary to secure sustained non-inflationary growth."[67] But Ernest Stern, senior vice president for finance, recently conceded, "From the fall of 1982, when the developing-country debt crisis broke, until the end of 1984, very little was done in these [heavily indebted] coun- tries which involved any kind of structural change."[68] Stern claimed that LDCs are now busy making structural adjustments. But if bank officials deceived the public in 1984, why should we believe them now?

As one World Bank official who has worked extensively with SALs noted, "In the Mexican structural adjustment loan, there was no mention of imposing limits on corruption or on capital flight--two of Mexico's biggest problems. The Bank did not even push Mexico to install a decent auditing system to control graft."[80]

In its 1986 structural adjustment loan to Mexico, the World Bank "guaranteed" Mexico a 3.5 percent growth rate; if the Mexican economy does not grow by at least that, the bank will be obliged to dole out another $500 million. First the Mexican government wrecks the economy, and then the bank comes along with free medicine for the country's ills. Yet the bank is obliged to compensate Mexico if its medicine does not work. Such arrangements may help the bank meet its loan goals, but it makes no sense to provide no-fault economic reform for irresponsible governments.

Many of the bank's SALs are simply going to governments to repay their debts to the bank or to the International Monetary Fund. If a country defaults on its World Bank debts, the bank's credit rating may suffer, in which case it will find it more difficult to raise capital. But if the bank continues to provide a net positive transfer of capital, the country has no incentive to default. This is simply a Ponzi scheme. For example, up to 75 percent of the Mexican SAL went for debt repayments.

According to one bank official, SALs merely "postpone the day of reckoning."[88] Another bank analyst asserted, "Policy-based lending is a figleaf. This is money that was transferred so that the countries would not default and undercut trade."[89] Fear of political instability is a major factor in SAL approval.

Even though the bank clearly recognizes the severity of environmental problems in the Third World, it continues funding some of the most pernicious projects around the globe and considering others that could do even more damage in the future.

In Kenya, the World Bank has invested some $29 million in the Bura irrigation scheme. But when President Daniel Arap Moi toured the site recently, he found "eroded irrigation canals, abandoned plots, poor crops, tumbledown and unsanitary housing, zebra grazing on irrigated land, and an air of general desolation and decay."[108] According to African Business, "a confidential World Bank mid-term evaluation report at the beginning of 1985 reported that Bura's tenants, aside from being so disaffected that a fifth of them had deserted their plots, suffered mortality and morbidity [rates] several times higher than the national average." Even though the project had invested almost $50,000 per family to be benefited, the bank report found severe malnutrition widespread among "beneficiaries." Correspondent Barbara Gunnell concluded, "The real loser is the Kenyan government, or as President Moi pointed out, future generations of Kenyans who will go on paying World Bank interest on the loan. . . . Loan repayments will be just as high as if the World Bank's economic appraisal that the scheme could expect a 13 percent rate of return had been correct."[109]

In Indonesia, the transmigration project is also devastating the tropical forests and squandering millions of dollars. The project makes almost no economic sense and pointlessly destroys the environment. The World Bank estimates that the total cost per family of resettling on Irian Jaya is about $7,000, or roughly 10 times Indonesia's per capita income. A United Nations Development Program study found that only 1 in 10 transmigration sites was considered economically profitable. [110]

Bruce Rich claims that transmigration is "ecologically disastrous in its very conception."[111] As the leader of a campaign by environmentalists to force the bank to alter its lending patterns, Rich notes that "Western aid agencies are currently channeling approximately three-quarters of their forestry assistance to Indonesia for environmental rehabilitation activities such as watershed management, reforestation and land rehabilitation--while some of the same agencies are simultaneously financing the deforestation, watershed erosion and land deterioration that is occurring in many transmigration sites."[112] An Indonesian government report recently complained that "an unfortunate cycle of destruction and reha- bilitation is becoming institutionalized." [113]

In Brazil, the bank has plowed over half a billion dollars into the Polonoroeste project to develop part of the Amazon region. This project is razing the Amazon Basin; already, an area the size of Great Britain has been deforested. Moreover, thanks to bank-financed roads, over 500,000 settlers have poured into western Brazil. But the majority of them have become snared in an economic quagmire, and about 200,000 have caught a particularly virulent strain of malaria.[114]

As in the tropical forests of Indonesia, soil productivity in the Amazon region has been poor, and the dreams of new farmers have been dashed. Marie Allegretti of Brazil's Institute of Socio-Economic Studies notes, "The turnover of the settlers in the new projects is shocking--in the Cujubim project, perhaps as many as 80 percent of those who received titles have left in 4 years."[115]

Elsewhere, the bank has made a major contribution to the desertification of Botswana. Two livestock projects to promote cattle raising in this Texas-sized southern African nation have resulted in serious overgrazing, caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of migratory animals, and depressed "the already limited subsistence capabilities of [Botswana's] poorer citizens," according to a report by two consultants to the bank. They concluded in 1982 that "it would be better if the Bank withdrew as firmly and rapidly as possible from the support of commercial ranch development in Botswana."[119] According to a report by the United Nations Environmental Project, "The degradation of the rangelands caused by over- grazing is doubtless the most serious environmental problem facing Botswana, and it forms the major constraint on the raising of the productivity of the land and thus the standard of living in rural areas."[120]

Diseases have spread, whole communities have been displaced and valuable crop and forest lands have been flooded. . . . Tens of millions of [hectares of] agricultural land have been lost through waterlogging and salinization. . . . In India, 10 million hectares have been lost to cultivation through waterlogging, and 25 million hectares are threatened by salinization. In Pakistan, more than half the Indus Basin canal system command area, some 12 million hectares, is waterlogged, and 40 percent is saline. Worldwide, FAO estimates, half the world's irrigated land is salinized badly enough that yields are affected.[125]

An examination of some of the policies and practices of World Bank recipient governments makes one doubt whether any amount of aid would allow these countries to become economically self-sufficient. Even though both countries profess to be drowning in debt, Nigeria and Argentina are spending billions to build lavish new capital cities. Many Third World leaders, including Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, Jose Lopez Portillo of Mexico, and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, became billionaires while performing their official duties. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and elsewhere, the economy is rigged to provide millions in kickbacks to powerful politicians and their friends and families.

Why should Western governments tax their citizens in order to facilitate increased government waste in the Third World? Economists have coined a word, "kleptocracy," to describe how some LDC governments systematically rob their own people. By lending governments billions that it knows will be squandered or stolen, the bank sells Third World citizens into debt slavery while allowing their rulers to stuff their pockets.
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Excellent Article!
http://www.globalissues.org/article/3/s ... of-poverty

Though the encouragement of exportation and the discouragement of importation are the two great engines by which the mercantile system proposes to enrich every country, yet with regard to some particular commodities it seems to follow an opposite plan: to discourage exportation and to encourage importation. Its ultimate object, however, it pretends, is always the same, to enrich the country by the advantageous balance of trade. It discourages the exportation of the materials of manufacture, and of the instruments of trade, in order to give our own workmen an advantage, and to enable them to undersell those of other nations in all foreign markets; and by restraining, in this manner, the exportation of a few commodities of no great price, it proposes to occasion a much greater and more valuable exportation of others. It encourages the importation of the materials of manufacture in order that our own people may be enabled to work them up more cheaply, and thereby prevent a greater and more valuable importation of the manufactured commodities. (Emphasis Added)

Progress has certainly been made as each year the number of children under 5 dying is slowly coming down. However, as UNICEF cautioned in their State of the World’s Children, 2008 PDF formatted document report, “progress has been unevenly distributed” (p.25). For example, good progress was made by a few nations with large populations, but many countries made “no progress or insufficient progress” (p.iii)
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bet if you exclude india it would be level
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http://www.graduatecareers.com.au/wp-co ... s_2014.pdf

A few pages in it contains a graph showing the advantage of getting a uni degree in australia is declining (while fees rise)
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Contribution to the case parental outcomes determine child outcomes

http://www.epi.org/publication/bp243/

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