Imperialism, the Mismeasurement of Poverty, and the Masking of Global Exploitation

Abstract

This chapter deconstructs the widely publicized set of statistics purportedly showing that extreme poverty in the world has fallen dramatically since 1990 as articulated by the World Bank and reiterated by leading UN institutions, neoliberal think tanks, publications, and spokespersons. The analytical categories and methodology employed by the World Bank to calculate its poverty statistics are subjected to a systematic critique, demonstrating that they serve the interests of economic imperialism. By artificially reducing global poverty through the statistical manipulation of its poverty metric, the World Bank can trumpet the success of neoliberalism, legitimating its further expansion through US-backed coups in countries such as Haiti and Bolivia. The genocidal misery imposed on the people of the Global South by the World Bank and the IMF through neoliberal policies such as structural adjustment programs and free trade agreements is thereby statistically erased, laying the foundation for a narrative of dramatically falling global poverty in the ‘New Millennium’ at odds with reality. If more reasonable metrics are used, such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) $5 per day standard, global poverty has clearly not fallen as claimed. The chapter also shows how neoliberalism itself is a form of economic imperialism. Finally, the rise of the BRICS and China in particular, celebrated by neoliberals and some on the left, is analysed as a development that ultimately fortifies, rather than contradicts, the advance of imperialism in the twenty-first century.