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The coronavirus is driving the world into another global recession. Companies are closing up shop, many workers are self-isolating, and the wheels of the global economy are slowing almost to the point of stopping. To combat the economic cataclysm, governments in the Global North are rolling out major plans for stimulus and bailout packages, ranging from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. But what about poorer countries, who cannot afford such massive bailouts? With high credit ratings and large economies, many countries in the Global North can borrow at interest rates close to zero and inject large amounts of money into their economies. Many nations in the Global South, however, suffer major structural obstacles to responding on a similar scale. Many are locked into crippling debt, high interest rates, and structural adjustment programs that prevent them from undertaking spending programs. If we are to avoid the COVID-19 pandemic deepening inequality and further harming poor countries, then we will need to attack the neocolonial shackles holding them back — and clear the way for a Global Green New Deal.

Neocolonial Shackles To understand the challenges facing the nations of the Global South as they grapple with COVID-19 and its fallout, we must understand the colonial and postcolonial strictures standing in their way. While the Global South achieved political independence with the end of colonialism, the West continued to exert control over its former colonies. Rather than directly running other nations, Western countries used what former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah called “neocolonial domination” to get their way through political and economic means. The figure below lends credence to Nkrumah’s claims: the average North-South gap in per-capita income has grown, not shrunk, since the 1960 United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which affirmed the right of all people to self-determination and proclaimed that colonialism should be brought to a speedy and unconditional end. Global inequality is now so high that the global Gini coefficient, which measures the level of inequality across the world, is about the same as South Africa’s — one of the most unequal societies on the planet. Part of the reason for the yawning gap between rich and poor countries is that the Global South has been locked into a form of indebted servitude to the Global North. Eager to dig themselves out of poverty and unable to raise capital through other means, developing countries have been forced to borrow money with stratospheric interest rates — often from the same countries that colonized them. As the University of Cape Town’s Misheck Mutize points out: African governments are paying interest of 5% to 16% on 10-year government bonds, compared to near zero to negative rates in Europe and America . . . On average, the interest repayment is the highest expenditure portion and remains the fastest growth expenditure in sub-Saharan Africa’s fiscal budgets. Another typical condition of the debt: neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs). Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund forced countries to adopt a raft of regressive policies — deregulation, privatization, public spending cuts — before it would open the purse strings. Now staring down the coronavirus pandemic, Global South countries are faced with a triple bind: to have the money to dole out stimulus and bailouts, many will have to take on more debt. To secure loans, they may have to impose additional “structural adjustment” policies. And those very measures will hollow out an already decrepit public sector, leaving countries ill-equipped for a mass pandemic.