Global economic volatility and slap-dash repairs to the international financial architecture

The Third World debt emerged as an acute crisis in 1982 and has never ceased its harm, but the debt crisis is merely a symptom of deeper global financial imbalances. Much has happened since that time, including dubious debt relief programs two decades later (which actually increased low-income Africa’s annual repayments from 2006–11!) and amplified uneven development between regions of the South. Hence, we have to spend some time at the outset establishing context dating back several decades. Only then can we properly proceed to consideration of global reform proposals to assess their feasibility, with particular emphasis on Jane D’Arista’s Keynesian proposals, and then onwards to an alternative strategy – ‘bottom up’ – with the same aims as D’Arista but based upon different readings of the balance of forces and hence of the impetus for genuine reform, which in my view will continue to emerge at the national not international scale.