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    Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation
    Unavailable
    Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation
    Unavailable
    Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation
    Ebook301 pages7 hours

    Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation

    By Patrick Bond

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are become poorer. From Tony Blair's Africa Commission and the Make Poverty History campaign to the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has witnessed the emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites with incomes derived from financial-parasitical accumulation. Without overstressing the 'mistakes' of such elites, this book contextualises Africa's wealth outflow within a stagnant but volatile world economy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZed Books
    Release dateApr 4, 2013
    ISBN9781848137288
    Unavailable
    Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation
    Author

    Patrick Bond

    Patrick Bond is professor at the University of the Western Cape School of Government. His research interests include political economy, environment, social policy, and geopolitics. He is the author of several books, including BRICS (Pluto, 2015) and Elite Transition (Pluto, 2014).

    Read more from Patrick Bond

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    Reviews for Looting Africa

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    • 4/5
      The total misery and underdevelopment of Africa has, after a period of neglect, regained much attention in Western nations the past few years. Several conferences as well as aid appeals, organized by NGO bureaucracies and pop stars, have been much in the picture for their supposed charitable efforts for the African poor. But to what degree to they actually address what the matter is with Africa?Patrick Bond, somewhat well-known in radical circles as a political economist, has written "Looting Africa" to summarize how global capital and its comprador elites within Africa have systematically plundered and ruined the continent before and after independence. Even now, the average income of Africans is lower than it was in the 1960s, and if one applies the necessary correctives to GDP tallies, many African nations have been losing per capita income as the result of foreign investment. Moreover, neoliberal programmes of privatization and monetarism have made the poor worse and worse off, without leading to any significant improvement in growth or development. Combine this with the massive theft of African production by local dictators and foreign multinationals, the extreme monoculture production of many African nations, and the unfair trade practices in agriculture on the part of Western nations (in particular the EU), and you have a recipe for disaster.Bond's analysis is telling and summarizes the issues well, making the book serve as a useful primer for further research into African political economy. He is somewhat vacillating and vague about possible solutions though, fixing some hope on radical NGOs and World Social Forums, but without explaining anything much in detail. It is also a pity that immigration from Africa to elsewhere, in particular Europe, is not addressed in the book. Nevertheless, this is a good popular introduction to the plunder of Africa in the past decades.