UN report shows poverty grinds on
The benefits of increased global trade, investment, technology and economic growth are not flowing through to the world's poorest people, a new United Nations report released on June 29 has found.
Worldwide, 1.2 billion people live on less than US$1 a day, more than a billion people in the Third World lack access to safe water and more than 2.4 billion lack adequate sanitation, the UN Development Program's Human Development Report 2000 reveals. One hundred million children live or work on the streets.
Yet the combined wealth of the richest 200 billionaires hit US$1135 billion in 1999, up from $1042 billion in 1998. The combined incomes of the 582 million people living in the world's 43 least developed countries (LDCs) is scarcely a 10th of this figure, $146 billion a year.
"Global inequalities in income increased in the 20th century by orders of magnitude out of proportion of anything experienced before", the report states. The distance between the incomes of the richest and poorest country has increased from 3:1 in 1920, 35:1 in 1950, 44:1 in 1973 and 72:1 in 1992. According to the report's principal coordinator, Dr Richard Jolly, a similar calculation today would show an even greater gap.
Catastrophes
The result of this growing divide is a human catastrophe. Twenty-two countries suffered a decline in human development, including falls in life expectancy, literacy, school enrolments and household incomes during the 1990s, while an additional 37 countries suffered a decline in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.
The world's three highest ranked countries on its Human Development Index are Canada, Norway and the United States (Australia is fourth), while the lowest are Sierra Leone, Niger and Burkina Faso.
The report charts progress in human development indicators in many areas: the proportion of underweight children in the Third World decreased from 37% to 27% between 1980 and 1999, and in rural areas, access to safe water increased from 13% to 71% between 1970 and 1999. Life expectancy in the Third World has risen from 55.6 years in 1975 to 64.4 years now, and adult illiteracy has nearly halved in 30 years.
But this progress has been very uneven and unequal: east and south-east Asia, and China especially, have advanced considerably in human development, while development in Latin America and the Caribbean, south Asia and the Arab states has been much slower. Sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union have generally gone backwards, as a result of civil conflicts, International Monetary Fund-enforced austerity policies, the return of capitalism to former planned economies and the HIV/AIDS pandemic (23 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected).
Technological advances in medicine have primarily flowed to the richest countries. By 1998, the infant mortality rate in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries had fallen to 12 per 1000 live births, compared to 40 in 1970, a 70% reduction. The infant mortality rate in all Third World countries fell by only 41% over the same period, from 110 to 64 while that of the LDCs fell by 31% over 28 years, from 150 to 104.
The OECD countries have three times the number of doctors per 100,000 people than the Third World. In the high-income countries, expenditure on health has increased from 5.3% of GDP in 1990 to 6.4%; in the low-income countries, it has fallen, from 0.9% to 0.8%. As a result, nearly all the 18 million people who die each year from communicable diseases live in the Third World; there were nearly four times as many tuberculosis cases in the Third World in 1997 as in the OECD countries.
Internal divisions
The report reveals inequalities both between and within countries.
The report's Gender-related Development Index reveals that women in every country are worse off than their countrymen. In Third World and OECD countries alike, women's and girls' literacy rates, school enrolments and share of national income are all lower than men's.
Inequalities in access to education, in particular, condemn many women in the Third World to extreme poverty. Women's literacy rate is only 64.3% (men's is 80.3%), and their enrolment rates at all levels of education are also lower (55%, compared to 63%). As a result, women's share of national income in the Third World is less than half that of men's.
Similarly, indigenous and other minority peoples are everywhere worse off, as are those in rural areas in comparison to their urban cousins. In Nepal, for example, members of the lowest caste, the "untouchables", live, on average, 15 years less than high-caste Brahmins. In Morocco, the rural illiteracy rate is twice the urban rate. In Canada in 1991, the life expectancy at birth of Inuit males was 58, 17 years below the country's average.
The report also shows considerable class divides. In Third World countries, the richest 20% of the population owns on average 50% of the country's wealth, 10 times that of the poorest 20%. The divide is almost as sharp in the industrialised world, where the top 20% own, on average, 35-40% of the country's wealth, five times that of the poorest 20%.
Reasons
The sums necessary to reduce poverty aren't enormous. The report estimates that an extra $80 billion a year would be needed to achieve universal provision of basic services in the Third World; a mere 0.28% of gross world product.
While primarily descriptive and statistical, the report does ask: "If global poverty eradication is both a moral obligation and a global public good, why is not enough of it being provided?". It provides some answers: the "incentives gap" (countries pursue their own national interest at the expense of their neighbours), the "jurisdictional gap" (while codified, breaches of political, social and economic rights obligations carry no penalties, while breaches of trade agreements do) and the "participation gap" (the poorest countries do not have the resources to ensure they get the best from international negotiations).
Its statistics provide other answers: investment, trade and lending Oare all controlled by the wealthiest countries which use them to the advantage of their ruling classes. Foreign direct investment flows, for example, nearly quadrupled in the decade to 1998, but 75% take place between OECD countries. Of the remainder, 83% goes to 20 select, profitable Third World countries, mainly China, Brazil, Mexico and Singapore. The 48 LDCs aren't deemed worthy, attracting only $3 billion in 1998, 0.4% of the total.
BY SEAN HEALY