> I have no doubt that neoliberal policies have caused millions of
> deaths, but what is your baseline here? Is this a projection based on
> trends underway before the eighties?
Just a guesstimate based on population -- 57% of the planet endured structural adjustment between 1981 and 2001, or roughly 3.6 billion people. The WHO says somewhere around 136 million children are born, globally, every single year, and most of those births are in the structural adjustment zone. Infant mortality rates range from 30 in middle-income countries up to 150 in the periphery (out of 1,000 live births).
Let's be conservative and assume that mortality rates in the periphery/semiperiphery could have been reduced to 45 instead of 50. That means a body count of 600,000 per annum, or 12 million over 20 years, in just one demographic age group. Add in all other deaths due to collapsing health care systems, malnutrition, deaths due to lack of AIDS prevention and medication, deaths due to misery, impoverishment, polarization and knock-on social violence, and 75 to 100 million excess deaths over two decades is entirely plausible.
-- DRR