Developing countries send trillions more to the west than the other way around

> Well, some of it is payments on debt. Developing countries have forked out over $4.2tn in interest payments alone since 1980

Since 1980, that's over a period of 36 years, compaired to the 1.3 trillion we give them yearly. 1.3 * 36 = 46.8 trillion that we gave them in the same period that they gave us 4.2 trillion dollars.

>Another big contributor is the income that foreigners make on their investments in developing countries and then repatriate back home.

Wait, so when Sony and Toyota start businesses here and makes money does that count as a wealth transfer from the West to Japan? It's almost like these "woe is oppressed 3rd world types" types want to keep poor nations poor by discouraging investments and businesses in those countries by classifying it as oppression and wealth transfer.

>But by far the biggest chunk of outflows has to do with unrecorded – and usually illicit – capital flight. . Basically, corporations – foreign and domestic alike – report false prices on their trade invoices in order to spirit money out of developing countries directly into tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, a practice known as “trade misinvoicing”. Usually the goal is to evade taxes, but sometimes this practice is used to launder money or circumvent capital controls. In 2012, developing countries lost $700bn through trade misinvoicing, which outstripped aid receipts that year by a factor of five.

Do these writers have any evidence that huge multinational corporations like BP are committing easily discover-able felonies like tax evasion in foreign countries? How could they possibly have calculated these numbers accurately without having several CEOs of multinational companies ending up jail?

This analysis was so bad it actually made me angry to read it. It felt like these researchers wanted to get to a particular result that would induce white guilt and fudged the numbers as much as possible to get that result.

> In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States

I'm very unclear on what this actually means.

Does it imply, for instance, that if developing countries were to cut themselves off from the rest of the world economically so that both the inflows and outflows all stopped, they would have $2tn/year more to spend domestically to improve the health and wellbeing of their citizens?

A lot of the outflows are deliberate economic policy to the benefit of the countries economy. China has bought ~$6 trillion of US treasuries over the past few decades via it's dollar sterilization policy to hold down it's currency (though this has reversed somewhat over the last year). This has benefited China by making it's exports more competitive, driving growth. Many East Asian countries also accumulated huge US dollar reserves after the 97 Asian financial crisis.

This is a problem, but not for the reasons stated by the article. I understand that this 'glut' of capital from developing countries had a big role to play in causing the 08 financial crisis. Because there aren't as many growth opportunities in developed countries, a lot of the money went into asset bubbles, like the US sub prime bubble that precipitated the crash.

The title is very misleading and click bait. The money going to the developing countries is actual aid. The money coming back is not aid. the money coming back is interest payments and taxes from foreign investments, etc.

Jack Ma is actually spot on. Us problems are created by ourselves: governments and greedy companies. We spent and made a lot on weapons as well. There is nothing to blame on China and Indian.

Vice-versa.