Deeper than Debt Economic Globalisation and the Poor

This new book by a Jubilee 2000 campaigner in Bolivia examines the role of debt in economic globalisation.

Debt is a good thing - for creditors. In the current global economy, the debt owed by the poorest countries allows the richest to have enormous influence over most Southern economies. Such control is enforced via the International Monetary Fund, which requires poor countries to export raw materials at low prices, cut back on social spending on areas such as health and education, and to privatise national wealth - all to generate dollars to pay rich creditors. Debt means four fifths of the world's population cannot develop, while inequality between the rich and poor grows.

Deeper than Debt brings together a wide range of arguments and views to examine the effects of economic globalisation on the lives of the poor majority in debtor countries, and how debt can illuminate the process of the ever-deepening inequality between rich and poor. It shows how debt is only a symptom of a chronic abuse of power in the economic sphere, by rich countries, which goes back to colonialism and continues to the present day. Deeper than Debt includes the Southern demands for a radical restructuring of the global economic system if equality is ever to be achieved.

The author, George Ann Potter, is an economic anthropologist with 20 years' experience of development management and policy work. She lives and works in Bolivia where she is involved in the Jubilee 2000 campaign.

Deeper than Debt is published by the Latin America Bureau, which works to broaden public understanding of social and economic justice issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. You can order the book from info@lab.org.uk , or + 44 20 7278 2829, price £8.99. For more information visit http://www.lab.org.uk