G20 Meeting in Melbourne

Forthcoming will be the exciting gabfest of G20. The economic forum that will discuss among other things, globalisation and the to cure world poverty.

I feel warm and fuzzy inside to learn that globalisation has helped relieve poverty.
Knowing the multi-national corporations are using children in factories in Vietnam to make Nike shoes and other numerous consumer goods that are sold at grossly inflated prices in the Western countries - is good. Exploitation = humanitarianism. Everybody benefits, it's a win-win situation.

Also, globalisation means that multi-nationals can avoid paying taxes to countries that are hosts to their enterprises. Through complex accounting schemes and elaborate money trails, they hide their real profits and avoid taxes that are supposed to benefit the host countries.

There's the option to bribe government officials in third world countries to turn a blind eye to safety and environmental issues. So the colloquial expression regarding wombats with it's double meaning "they eats roots and leaves", can be applied to multi-nationals, they reap, plunder and leave.

I'll give you just one small example, the Island of Nauru, was plundered for it's natural reserves of super phosphate. This is used as a fertilizer. The result is that Nauru is now an uninhabitable moonscape.
The people of Nauru might be rich, but they have no country.

I could give many more examples but what's the point?

Poverty and economic growth were my favorite subjects when studying Economics. I will write about the solutions to poverty in another blog.