Читать книгу The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith - Страница 37

PART TWO

WEALTH &

POVERTY

The two decades up to 2008 were hardly still waters in the global economy,

and the sense of safety and certainty about the economy that opinion-leaders

and policy-makers in the rich countries often expressed was always somewhat

shallow and misleading. There was a severe downturn at the turn of the 1980s

into the 1990s, followed by Japan’s lost decade, and the costs and upheavals

in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as they went through a massive

economic transformation, then an Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s

and the collapse of many new technology companies in the early years of this

century. And in the countries where there was more or less steady economic

growth, there were plenty of losers as well as winners, while global poverty

persisted. But there was also an unmistakable – and now absent – sensation

of forward movement, a confidence that economic problems were open to

relatively straightforward solutions, and trust in many countries that the hands

on the economic tiller were competent and dependable.

Today it feels so very different. And in the change of conditions brought about

by economic events since 2008, it is sometimes hard to disentangle what

has really changed and what not. As always, not everybody gains and loses

equally. One line of inequality has been narrowing and there is every reason

to expect it to continue to do so: the old idea of a sharp division in the world

between rich countries and poor countries no longer holds in the same form.

The contrasts are now more subtle, as other lines of inequality are getting

broader. Some countries are richer than others, but in the rich countries there

remains much poverty. India is no longer one of the poorest countries, not

even when wealth is measured per head of the population. But there are more

people living in poverty in India than in any other country. Worldwide, the

number of people living below $1 a day is declining, but the number on less

than $2 a day is over 2.5 billion – more than one person in three in the

global population.

World leaders committed themselves at the start of the century to a major

effort at international social and economic development, with the richer

countries pledging to spend more on aiding development. Promises were

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