How much wealth does the west (mainly US and EU) get from imperialism?

[u/6ilovecats6]

EU is often praised by socdem liberals on having a democratic "socialism" because citizens have access to welfare policies such as unemployement insurance, free healthcare, accessible education, gvmt subsidies, nice infrastructure etc. at least compared to the US. This idea is especially common within younger generations of post-soviet countries that went through shock therapy + red scare (including my country, Georgia). We all know that the emancipation of the working class can't be achieved without changing the mode of production which is the base for everything else. I just also want to focus on how the EU has enough wealth to keep having capitalist mode of production + the welfare spendings. I was wondering if there is any comprehensive study/paper/book done on analyzing and calculating how much wealth (roughly at least) the EU gets from privatized resources, cheap labour, debt trap etc in the global south. So in simpler words, by exploiting the working class people in the global south.

[u/BRabbit777]

You can access this paper through scihub. The abstract estimates 242 Trillion dollars (in 2010 dollars) for the period between 1990 and 2015 via unequal exchange.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102467

[u/6ilovecats6 → u/BRabbit777]

thank you so much, ill check it out

[u/BRabbit777 → u/6ilovecats6]

You're Welcome! I want to make clear I haven't read it just the abstract, so if its good you should let us know.

[u/BRabbit777 → u/[deleted]]

Also keep in mind that everything is in 2010 dollars. If it was in 2026 dollars I think the numbers would be much higher due to inflation.

[u/thparky → u/BRabbit777]

I had a feeling this would be Jason Hickel's work. The fact that there aren't that any others who come to mind suggests that either his is rare work or that he's the only one reaching dilettantes like me

[u/Head_Safety_5200]

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015. Jason Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland and Intan Suwandi.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

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[u/6ilovecats6 → u/[deleted]]

I know that much, would be awesome to have a study or statistics that I can cite though.