That's obvious nonsense. Look what Japan, China and India have done for the world. First cheap fast-growing investments producing low cost goods (aka sweatshops), then a rich economy that can do its own investing. Even countries that get a smaller slice of the pie now still have cause to be glad that the whole pie is larger.

What's the mechanism there? How do they benefit? Exploitation is rather impossible these days, rich countries cannot anymore just waltz into any country they want and dictate the terms. If they are doing business with some poor country that usually leads to progress, not exploitation. It might very well be that rich countries want to use poor countries for cheap labor and - by keeping them poor - preserve that source of cheap labor. But it might also very well be that those two wishes are one too many. Maybe you can have only one at a time.

How so? I'm not convinced the leaders of rich countries think much beyond their next re-election, and whilst there may be some benefit to having cheap labour, you need a reasonable infrastructure in place to take advantage of that. You can't run a factory if you don't have a reliable power supply, for example.