The shift of production processes to developing countries also relocates the ecological and health costs of polluting production processes to countries with less stringent environmental regulations (UNCTAD, 2013b). The second recent development concerns intensified global imbalances, which threaten the economic sustainability of the model, to which the chapter now turns. For some countries, the longterm decline in savings and the accumulation of private debt has increased consumption in spite of stagnant earnings, resulting in large current account deficits. At the same time, countries with a current account surplus used export markets as a way to sustain employment in the absence of sufficient domestic aggregate demand (Blecker, 2012, UNCTAD, 2010).