The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

This is how the plan was supposed to work: the IMF would help developing countries finance their debt on the condition that they would agree to a series of ‘structural adjustment programmes’. Structural adjustment programmes, or SAPs, included two basic mechanisms for debt repayment. First, developing countries had to redirect all their existing cash flows and assets towards debt service. They had to cut spending on public services like healthcare and education and on subsidies for things like farming, food and infant industries; they also had to privatise public assets by selling off state companies like telecoms and railways. In other words, they had to reverse their developmentalist reforms. The savings gleaned from spending cuts and the proceeds of privatisation would then be funnelled back to Wall Street to repay debts. In other words, public assets and social spending retroactively became collateral in the repayment of foreign loans – an arrangement that was, of course, never agreed at the time the loans were signed. Global South countries were made to pay for the banks’ risky practices with billions – even trillions – of dollars taken from ordinary people. This amounted to an enormous transfer of wealth from the public coffers of impoverished global South countries to the richest banks in the West. The second mechanism was slightly less direct. Countries that were subject to structural adjustment programmes were forced to radically deregulate their economies. They h...