Richard Werner
speaker
4,694 appearances
9 recordings
3 series
first heard Jul 2025
last heard 22 May
Richard Werner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 6.
Appearances
And that's exactly what the IMF and the World Bank are preaching and enforcing in their policies on developing countries.
You know, the conditionality, you get money,
Carrot, but here's the stick, you have to adopt these policies.
Free trade policies allow foreign investment, deregulate, liberalize, privatize, which effectively means these countries are stuck in a low value-added activity, exporting commodities.
They're not allowed to build up their own industries, move up the value-added ladder.
And they're not allowed to prevent foreigners from buying up their industries cheaply.
Now, empirically, this model has been proven wrong many times over.
Actually, Prebysch and Singer showed already a long time ago that commodities exporters have declining terms of trade.
Yes.
Now, what does that mean?
Terms of trade is simply the export price divided by the import price.
It's basically the relative...
price you get for what you're selling compared to what you have to buy what you're importing right and and what they've shown is that if you're exporting commodities
And if you're focusing on that, that means all your high valued goods, manufacturing goods are imported, right?
And that's the position developing countries in.
But if you are in this position, what happens over time, and they looked at around almost half a century, actually more than half a century, you could show that the terms of trade must deteriorate, which means you will ever get less for your exports in relative terms, and you have to pay ever more for your imports.
and therefore you're getting poorer, and you're not getting the benefit from trade.
That's what the IMF and the World Bank are locking developing countries in through their policy regime.
And it's not a coincidence.
And even David Ricardo knew this very well.
Showing 821–840 of 4,694 · page 42 of 235
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