After two successful in-person workshops for communications professionals in the wider field of Development Studies over the last two years, this year’s workshop and get-together of the EADI Research Communications Working Group is going online. In order not to overload participants with virtual input and contribute to zoom fatigue, we have decided to keep our sessions short and concise, with longer breaks in-between. Like in our previous workshops, we place a strong focus on interactive exchange based on the ideas and needs of participants.

By Christian Dorninger, Anke Schaffartzik, and Hanspeter Wieland

Through international trade, richer countries do not merely generate a monetary trade surplus, but also appropriate international resources and labour from poorer countries. While this allows high consumption standards, economic growth, and the simultaneous protection of domestic natural resources in some countries, more land for mining and agriculture for exports is being extracted from the local economies in others. As a result, this makes a socially-ecologically sustainable development impossible. Our research team was now able to prove that ecologically unequal exchange was a persistent feature of the global economy from 1990 to 2015. Using environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output modelling, we investigated these structural inequalities in international trade.