Tag: Europe
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Double standards in ‘Free Trade’
Wealthier countries in Europe make extensive use of import taxes to make imported goods more expensive and protect domestic business. At the same time they cajole African countries to sign free trade agreements which prevent them from imposing import taxes on European products which puts local farmers in Africa out of business. This means that…
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How Europe’s Agricultural Polices Hurt Africa
International trade policies seem to benefit large scale industrial farmers in Europe and hurt smaller scale farmers in Africa. This is according to a recent 2018 DW documentary which focuses on how Industrial technology, large scale industrial production and European Union Subsidies make EU agricultural products much cheaper than locally produced African agricultural products, despite…
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Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Revision Notes)
Protestantism led to Capitalism because it encouraged hard work and saving, according to Weber
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The End of Development?
A summary of The End of Development: A Global History of Poverty and Prosperity, by Andrew Brooks (2017) This blog post covers Part 1: Making the Modern World Chapter 1: environmental determinism and early human history The argument in this chapter is that nature (as in the natural environment) does not determine human society and…
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The End of Poverty? A Documentary taking a ‘Dependency Theory’ View of Underdevelopment and Development
This 2008 Documentary seeks to answer the question of why there is still so much poverty in the world when there is sufficient wealth to eradicate it. In order to answer this question, the video goes back to 1492, which marks the start of European colonialism and the beginning of the global capitalist system, making…
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Dependency Theory
Dependency Theorists argue that rich countries accumulated their wealth through exploiting poorer countries. Initially this was through colonialism and slavery, later on through neo-colonialism. To develop, poorer countries need to break free from these exploitative relations.
