Last Updated on February 8, 2020
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.
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