Читать книгу The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith - Страница 11
Оглавлениеcrunch in 2007 and 2008, triggering recession and a financial catastrophe
whose full effects had not played out some four or five years later.
If we look back over those 20 years, we can see how quickly confidence about
the future can be generated and then lost. We need something rather better
than that moodiness, something more stable and persistent, if we are going
to be successful in facing up to the five big challenges we face as a global
community: wealth and poverty, war and peace, rights and respect, and the
health both of the people and of the planet.
WEALTH & POVERTY
The world is marked by large inequalities of wealth. Multiple further
inequalities flow from that starting point – dramatically different degrees
of access to education, health care, good food, clean water, sanitation,
reasonable housing. Though the proportion of the world’s population that
lives in the extreme poverty of less than $1 a day is declining, progress is slow
and more than one-third of all people live on less than $2 a day. The benefits
of economic growth are not being distributed evenly or anything like it, and
at the same time the model of economic development is environmentally
unsustainable.
At the start of the century, world leaders undertook to make a major new
effort to help developing countries move forward. In the confident spirit of
that time, more money was committed and targets were set with a fixed date
of 2015. These Millennium Development Goals have guided Western countries’
official development assistance ever since. In the much less confident spirit in
which these donor governments are working a decade on, still reeling from
the economic aftershocks of 2008, it is clear that there has been progress
but the targets will not be met. And some of the most significant economic
development and alleviation of poverty in the last decade seems to have
owed very little, if anything, to the Millennium Development Goals.
Above all, on the economic front, the events of 2008 and since have
generated a growing realization of another axis of change. For a long
time it has been recognized that the economic output of China and India
was growing much more quickly than that of Europe and the USA. China’s
eventual assumption of the position as the world’s largest economy – and
India’s as the third largest, with the USA staying second – has been long
anticipated. Whether that makes them in a meaningful sense two of the
three wealthiest countries is another matter, because their output per person
remains much lower than in the USA and Europe. There is, nonetheless, a
distinct political weight that comes with economic size. And the effect has
been emphasized because, while the USA’s recovery from 2008 has been
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