-
Becoming Equal
...inequality across countries has started to decline since the late 1990s. -
"Catching Up"
A “catching up” phenomenon is now at play, with some of the poorest countries having emerged and turned into global engines of growth. -
One Person VS. The Entire World Population
What if we do not compare, say, Poland to Germany, or rich and poor in Poland, but each person in the world to all others? Would we see global inequalities, those between the world’s richest and poorest citizens regardless of where they live, on the rise or in decline ? -
The Gaps Still Remain
As could be expected, it shows that the world remains a tremendously unequal place. Using a standard indicator (the Gini coefficient), global inequality is far greater than inequality within any country, even the most unequal ones. The gap between a poor person in India or Sub-Saharan Africa and the Western upper-class is an abyss. -
Improvement
It is often assumed that there are two main groups who benefit from globalization – the “top 1 percent” and the “emerging middle class” in countries like China, India, etc. The numbers confirm these intuitions. But they also show that the income of the “emerging middle class” rose even faster than that of the top 1 percent. And that this “emerging middle class” accounts for about half of humankind. This is no small feat! -
In All
The study highlights the need to accelerate economic growth, as to increase as rapidly as possible the distance from the potentially swampy grounds of the "global upper middle class". It also suggests that continued policy action is needed to ensure that prosperity can be truly shared by all, that the gains of globalization are not captured by a "happy few”,on the contrary that all can take advantage of the opportunities offered by the globalization process, including those who earn the least. -
In All continued
It highlights the importance of contributing to other countries’ development to reduce the global inequalities which can be the seeds of geopolitical turmoil. And most importantly it provides a confirmation (with numbers !) that the world is indeed becoming a better place. -
Work Cited
Rzeczpospolita, Xavier Devictor. "Is Globalization a Good or a Bad Thing?" World Bank. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 May 2017.