> that’s largely a government failure to rein in labor exploitation and to regulate markets for fairness and competitiveness
do you mean governments in the global south? if yes, you might be a victim to the (racist, white-supremacist) myth that countries in the global south are in some ways 'backward', and that through opening their countries to foreign direct investment they can somehow catch up with global north, despite the fact that the global north propertied class makes this impossible by commoditizing scientific knowledge and technology.
in other words: the global north propertied class continually 'kicks away the ladder' and offers technology transfers through parasitic debt, and then pretends they also climbed up/ascended using those strategies (which they didn't) [1]. the global south countries aren't 'behind' (and thus a 'developing' country): the global north propertied class makes and keeps them poor in the first place.
"Corruption, superpower style
According to the World Bank, corruption in the form of bribery and theft by government officials, the main target of the UN Convention, costs developing countries between $20bn and $40bn each year. That’s a lot of money. But it’s an extremely small proportion – only about 3 percent – of the total illicit flows that leak out of public coffers. On the other hand, multinational companies steal more than $900bn from developing countries each year through tax evasion and other illicit practices.
This enormous outflow of wealth is facilitated by a shadowy financial system that includes tax havens, paper companies, anonymous accounts, and fake foundations, with the City of London at the very heart of it. Over 30 percent of global foreign direct investment is booked through tax havens, which now collectively hide one-sixth of the world’s total private wealth.
This is a massive – indeed, fundamental – cause of poverty in the developing world, yet it does not register in the mainstream definition of corruption, absent from the UN Convention, and rarely, if ever, appears on the agenda of international development organisations." [2]
on top of the tax evasion, there is also the (ecologically) unequal exchange between the global north and global south:
"Imperial powers finally withdrew most of their flags and armies from the South in the mid-20th century. But over the following decades, economists and historians associated with “dependency theory” argued that the underlying patterns of colonial appropriation remained in place and continued to define the global economy. Imperialism never ended, they argued – it just changed form.
They were right. Recent research demonstrates that rich countries continue to rely on a large net appropriation from the global South, including tens of billions of tonnes of raw materials and hundreds of billions of hours of human labour per year – embodied not only in primary commodities, but also in high-tech industrial goods like smartphones, laptops, computer chips and cars, which over the past few decades have come to be overwhelmingly manufactured in the South.
This flow of net appropriation occurs because prices are systematically lower in the South than in the North. For instance, wages paid to Southern workers are on average one-fifth the level of Northern wages. This means that for every unit of embodied labour and resources that the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units to pay for it.
Economists Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel described this as a “hidden transfer of value” from the South, which sustains high levels of income and consumption in the North. The drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.
In a recent paper published in the journal New Political Economy, we built on the work of Amin and others to quantify the scale of drain through unequal exchange in the post-colonial era. We found that the drain increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, as neoliberal structural adjustment programmes were imposed across the global South. Today, the global North drains from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion per year, in Northern prices. For perspective, that amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, fifteen times over." [3]
[1] Kicking Away the Ladder - Ha-Joon Chang, https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb
[2] Flipping the corruption myth - Jason Hickel, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/1/flipping-the-cor...
[3] Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960 - Jason Hickel, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/6/rich-countries-d...