Читать книгу The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith - Страница 11

crunch 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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