Guardian: Europe needs debt relief, not decades of austerity
Datum: 28-03-2011
In de Britse krant The Guardian stond vandaag een uitgebreid artikel over de schuldencrisis in Europa met onder meer Nick Dearden van Jubilee Debt Campaign.
De 'schuldenval' waar Europese landen als Griekenland, Ierland en Portugal zich nu in bevinden, klinken Jubilee-campainers bekend in de oren. Zij pleiten al jaren voor een oplossing voor de grote schuldenproblemen van ontwikkelingslanden.
Nick Dearden, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign, points to the case of Zambia. It was bailed out by the International Monetary Fund in the early 1980s, to prevent the government defaulting on the debts it owed to western banks, which had been on a reckless African lending spree. Zambia compliantly took the medicine the IMF prescribed, including severe spending cuts – but these simply drove the country into a deeper and deeper slump, making its debts ever more unsustainable. By 1995, Zambia's economic output had contracted by 30%, but its debt-to-GDP ratio had doubled, to 150%. It's hard to argue that it wouldn't have been better for the country simply to have defaulted on part of its debt.
What creditors were eventually forced to admit in the case of much developing country debt was that, in practice, there was absolutely no likelihood of getting their money back; and morally, it was wrong for the debts to be honoured when many of the loans should never have been made in the first place. It's time for more people to start making the same argument in Europe.
Lees het hele artikel op de website van The Guardian.
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