Victoria Brittain and Larry Elliott
THE wealth of the world’s 358 billionaires is greater than the combined annual incomes of nearly half the world’s people, according to a United Nations report highlighting the growing gulf between rich and poor countries.
Warning that the disparity threatens an instability that can only be tackled by a new international solidarity, the UN’s human development report said 1,6-billion people in 100 countries had lower living standards now than in the 1980s.
Richard Jolly, chief author of the study, called for a three-pronged strategy to reverse the trend: a target of 3% per capita growth in the poorest countries, an emphasis on making expansion sustainable and more equitable, and action to avoid the five forms of undesirable growth.
The UN described these as jobless growth, ruthless growth where only the rich benefit, anti-democratic voiceless growth, unsustainable futureless growth, and rootless growth, which tramples on cultural identities.
The report said that whereas the richest 20% of the world’s population were 30 times better off than the poorest 20% in 1960, they were now 61 times wealthier.
“If present trends continue, economic disparities between industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable to inhuman,” said James Gustave Speth, the American who heads the UN Development Programme. The UNDP commissioned the report, the seventh in a controversial annual series covering the world economy from a perspective that does not put economic growth top of the agenda.
The report ranked the countries of the world according to a human development index — measuring life expectancy, education and real income — rather than by gross national product. Canada, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway were the top scorers, with Britain in 16th place, behind Finland, Spain and Australia. Barbados, Bahamas and South Korea were top scorers among developing countries.
Economic growth had failed for a quarter of the world’s people, leading to a global polarisation, the report said. Eighty-nine countries were now worse off than they were 15 years ago, while 15 countries, mainly in Asia, had experienced a dramatic surge in economic growth over the same period. Malaysia had grown by 3,5% and China and Korea by 8,2%.
One of the most important findings of the report is that the east and south-east Asian countries which have grown fastest have also been the most fair in the division of income and assets such as land and credit. These countries invest heavily in education and social services, the report underlined.
The high-performance Asian states are also among those that have successfully tackled the world wide problem of unemployment. (Mauritius, Japan and Sweden are other examples of government commitment to job protection.)
A study of 69 countries showed that of the 46 with economic growth, more than 40% experienced jobless growth.
The Nobel economics prize winner Robert Solow, in a provocative essay in the report, described as a paradox the fashion for sustainable development and the lack of interest in the inequalities of today. “Those who are so urgent about not inflicting poverty on the future have to explain why they do not attach even higher priority to reducing poverty today.”
l The Human Development Report 1996 is published by Oxford University Press.