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How the Bank’s push for microcredit failed the poor

19 December 2017 - by Milford Bateman

Popularised in the 1980s by the work of future (in 2006) Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit model was seen as the most awe-inspiring local economic development model of all time. The disbursement of a simple microloan to the poor was seen as pure genius: it allowed (...)
Debt sustainability review: Tinkering around the edges while crises loom

19 December 2017 - by Tim Jones, Mark Perera

Under the joint Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF) of the World Bank and IMF (Bretton Woods Institutions or BWIs), regular assessments of the risk of external debt distress are conducted for all countries that are eligible to borrow from either institutions’ concessional lending funds (the (...)
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs)

18 December 2017 - by Sudhir Shrestha

When Belt and Road Forum (BRF) was held on May 14-15, 2017 in Beijing, four Least Developed Countries (LDCs), namely Cambodia, Ethiopia, Laos and Myanmar, sent their highest level of delegation as their support to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) envisioned by China. Afghanistan, Bangladesh (...)
The Odious Iraqi Debt

12 December 2017 - by Eric Toussaint

This article, originally written towards the end of 2003, is now published on our website for the first time in English. The odious Iraqi debt is still under-documented today, though it is highly relevant in our research and our proposals against all illegitimate, illegal, odious and (...)
The case for repudiation of Uganda’s public debt

8 December 2017 - by Mary Serumaga

Uganda is in imminent danger of defaulting on its debt repayment obligations. The Auditor General notes in 2017 that interest payments on the public debt exceeded legal limits (15% of the annual budget) and are likely to be unsustainable going forward. What will follow will be attempts by (...)
Hunger, Foreign Debt and Uganda’s Fairytale Budgets

29 November 2017 - by Mary Serumaga

An abiding image of Uganda in April 2017 is of a group of elderly people squatting around an anthill, men and women, patting it with bunches of greenery to coax the termites out. They then pluck up the termites and eat them, not as the seasonal delicacy usually caught by young people on moonlit (...)
Final declaration of the Bamako “Women, Debt and Microcredit” seminar

29 November 2017 - by CADTM International

We, women of the CADTM Africa network, from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Conakry, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Congo Democratic Republic, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Togo, as well as Argentina have met for the 3rd session of the seminar “Women, Debt and Microcredit” in (...)
Ready for the next storm? Debt (crisis) management discussed at the UNCTAD and Paris Club

28 November 2017 - by Bodo Ellmers

The number of poor countries that are in debt crisis is increasing rapidly, as is the share of public revenue that southern governments need to divert from essential services to pay down debts. The international community is awaiting the storm with remarkable silence: only peacemeal steps have (...)
We saw Puerto Rico’s struggle to survive

27 November 2017 - by Monique Dols, Lance Selfa

The federal government in Washington and local government agencies in Puerto Rico are eager to project the appearance of the island returning to a pre-Hurricane Maria status quo. But millions of Puerto Ricans know better. SocialistWorker.org contributors Monique Dols and Lance Selfa traveled to (...)
The bullet train project in India: a story of white elephant and public debt

27 November 2017 - by Sushovan Dhar

We are a happy nation waiting to ride the bullet train... The Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail (MAHSR), connecting these major metropolis in western India, is soon to be built with Japanese finance and assistance. The Japanese PM Shinzo Abe and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi jointly (...)
Farmers storm India’s national capital, demanding freedom from debt and better price for their produce

24 November 2017 - by La Via Campesina

Several thousand small-holder farmers from across India held a massive demonstration in New Delhi, from 20-21 November to draw attention to the acute agrarian distress plaguing the countryside and seeking immediate intervention by the Union Government. Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and South (...)
Latin America: 200 years of the infernal cycle of debt

23 November 2017 - by Eric Toussaint, Marie Charrel

Eric Toussaint, of the CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt), explains the difficulties encountered by States overly dependent on raw materials. With a PhD in Political Science and speaking for CADTM international, Eric Toussaint has just published Le Systeme dette, (...)
Zimbabwe witnessing an elite transition as economic meltdown looms

20 November 2017 - by Patrick Bond

In Harare, Bulawayo and smaller Zimbabwean cities, hundreds of thousands of citizens joyfully took to the streets on Saturday, November 18, approving a Zimbabwe Defence Force (ZDF) military semi-coup that resolves a long-simmering faction fight within the ruling party and ends the extraordinary (...)
Brazil: the debt dilemma

16 November 2017 - by Michael Roberts

Brazil faces a presidential election in October 2018. This will offer a new benchmark for which way Brazilian politics and the economy will go. Will a coalition of pro-big business parties and a president win or will a coalition led by the Workers party return to power under a leftist (...)
Haiti: From trafficking to debt

11 November 2017 - by Jérôme Duval

This Caribbean country is not in debt, it is a creditor. It is France which owes it money. Explanation by Jerome Duval, of CADTM. Translated by Jenny Bright. Poverty in colonised countries has greatly increased due to a transfer of debt: the debts incurred by the colonial powers to the World (...)
Punitive Neoliberalism and Financial Melancholia in Puerto Rico

6 November 2017 - by Rafael Bernabe

BEFORE HURRICANE MARIA smashed into Puerto Rico with devastating force, the previous Hurricane Irma caused relatively manageable damage compared to its horrific impact in much of the Caribbean. Even so, the island’s electrical grid — before Maria utterly destroyed it — had already suffered outages (...)
Sri Lanka: Debt drives Jaffna mom, children to death

28 October 2017 - by Meera Srinivasan

Just as mounting household debt in Sri Lanka’s war-affected region began drawing national attention, a young mother in Jaffna, said to be heavily indebted, consumed poison along with her three children and died on Friday. Local media reports said the woman added poison to ice cream and fed her (...)
Campaign improves IMF debt assessments, but risk of crises continues to increase

20 October 2017 - by Tim Jones

The IMF and World Bank have agreed some positive changes to their system for monitoring debts of impoverished countries, though some large issues have been ignored. The system, known as the Debt Sustainability Framework, is important as it directly impacts on amounts of lending by the World (...)
Hidden debts contribute to crisis in Congo

18 October 2017 - by Jubilee Debt Campaign

The IMF has reported that the Republic of Congo’s debt is higher than previously thought, but has not shown by how much or who the hidden debt is owed to. The Fund and Congo are in discussion on a bailout and austerity programme. In a March 2017 press release the IMF said the Congo’s government (...)
Puerto Rico: Some Lessons of the Hurricane

6 October 2017 - by Rafael Bernabe

Crises raise new, sharp problems that unveil and accentuate both the admirable and the negative aspects of the societies they affect. They also pose new tasks and offer new perspectives on already established plans. The case of Puerto Rico and the effect and response to the strike by Hurricane (...)
A legacy of liberalisation in Sri Lanka

4 October 2017 - by B. Skanthakumar

The Sri Lankan government recently released its ‘Vision 2025’ manifesto, heralding a new wave of economic reforms. Its timing coincided with the 40th anniversary of the island’s embrace of deregulation, trade liberalisation, and privatisation ahead of the rest of South Asia. While the current (...)
Puerto Rico: Belonging to, But Not Part of

1 October 2017 - by Ed Morales

The Trump administration’s delay in sending real aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria is a distasteful display of colonialist racism. But it’s par for the course: our citizenship has always been second-class. “We’re American citizens. How can Trump turn his back on us?” This is one of the (...)
‘Africa Rising’ in retreat: Signs of new resistances

29 September 2017 - by Patrick Bond

Capitalism is bleeding Africa to death: illegal financial flows, legal financial outflows, FDI flows, foreign indebtedness, sub-imperial accumulation, new subsidies for infrastructure financing and uncompensated mineral and oil and gas depletion. The continent is further threatened by land (...)
Demand debt relief for hurricane-hit islands

25 September 2017 - by Jubilee Debt Campaign

A petition to all creditors, including the IMF and World Bank Over recent weeks, several countries in the Caribbean have been devastated by hurricanes. Some of those countries were already heavily indebted, often in part because of loans taken out to help with rebuilding efforts following (...)
First as tragedy, now as farce: lessons from 12 August 1982

11 September 2017 - by Mark Perera

As the saying goes, history repeats itself because no one was listening the first time. This month marks the 35th anniversary of an event that sparked a debt crisis across the developing world. It was a crisis triggered by low interest rates in the Global North, a reckless boom in lending and (...)

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Finance against people

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Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

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