Economy & Trade, Featured, Financial Crisis, Global, Global Governance, Headlines, TerraViva United Nations

Opinion

Growing Inequality under Global Capitalism

Anis Chowdhury, a former professor of economics at the University of Western Sydney, held senior United Nations positions during 2008-2015 in New York and Bangkok. Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor and United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has described severe income inequality as the biggest risk facing the world. Credit: IPS

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, May 4 2017 (IPS) - Income and wealth inequality has increased in recent decades, but recognition of the role of economic liberalization and globalization in exacerbating inequality has never been so widespread. The guardians of global capitalism are nervous, yet little has been done to check, let alone reverse the underlying forces.

Global elite alarmed by growing inequality
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has described severe income inequality as the biggest risk facing the world. WEF founder Klaus Schwab has observed, ‘We have too large a disparity in the world; we need more inclusiveness… If we continue to have un-inclusive growth and we continue with the unemployment situation, particularly youth unemployment, our global society is not sustainable.’

Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director, told political and business leaders at the WEF, “in far too many countries the benefits of growth are being enjoyed by far too few people. This is not a recipe for stability and sustainability”. Similarly, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has warned that failure to tackle inequality risked causing social unrest. “It’s going to erupt to a great extent because of these inequalities.”

In the same vein, the influential US Council of Foreign Relations’ journal, Foreign Affairs carried an article cautioning, “Inequality is indeed increasing almost everywhere in the post-industrial capitalist world…. if left unaddressed, rising inequality and economic insecurity can erode social order and generate a populist backlash against the capitalist system at large.”

Much ado about nothing?

Increasingly, the main benefits of economic growth are being captured by a tiny elite. Despite global economic stagnation for almost a decade, the number of billionaires in the world has increased to a record 2,199. The richest one per cent of the world’s population now has as much wealth as the rest of the world combined. The world’s eight richest people have as much wealth as the poorer half.

In India, the number of billionaires has increased at least tenfold in the past decade. India now has 111 billionaires, third in the world by country. The largest number of the world’s abject poor also live in the same country — over 425 million, a third of the world’s poor, and well over a third of the country’s population.

Africa had a resource boom for a decade until 2014, but most people there still struggle daily for food, clean water and health care. Meanwhile, the number of people living in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank, has grown substantially to at least 330 million from 280 million in 1990!

In Europe, poor people bore the brunt of draconian austerity policies while bank bailouts mainly benefited the moneyed. 122.3 million people, or 24.4 per cent of the population in the EU-28, are at risk of poverty. Between 2009 and 2013, the number of Europeans without enough money to heat their homes or cope with unforeseen expenses, i.e., living with ‘severe material deprivation’, rose by 7.5 million to 50 million people, while the continent is home to 342 billionaires!

In the United States, the income share of the top one per cent is at its highest level since the eve of the Great Depression, almost nine decades ago. The top 0.01 per cent, or 14,000 American families, own 22.2 per cent of its wealth, while the bottom 90 per cent, over 133 million families, own a meagre four per cent of the nation’s wealth. The top five per cent of households increased their share of US wealth, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, the richest one per cent tripled their share of US income within a generation.

This unprecedented wealth concentration and the corresponding deprivation of others have generated backlashes, arguably contributing to the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election, the Brexit referendum, the strength of Marine Le Pen in France and the Alternative for Germany, and the ascendance of the Hindutva right in secular India.

‘Communist’ China and inequality
Meanwhile, China has increasingly participated in and grown rapidly as inequality has risen sharply in the ostensibly communist-ruled country. China has supplied cheaper consumer goods to the world, checking inflation and improving living standards for many. Part of its huge trade surplus — due to relatively low, albeit recently rising wages — has been recycled in financial markets, mainly in the US, which helped expand credit at low interest rates there.

Thus, cheap consumer products and cheap credit have enabled the slowly shrinking ‘middle class’ in the West to mitigate the downward pressure on their living standards despite stagnating or falling real wages and mounting personal and household debt.

China’s export-led development on the basis of low wages has sharply increased income inequality in the world’s largest country for more than three decades. Beijing is the new ‘billionaire capital of the world’, no longer New York. China now has 594 billionaires, 33 more than in the US!

Since the 1980s, income inequality in China has risen faster than most! China now has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality, rising mainly in the last three decades. The richest one per cent of households own a third of the country’s wealth, while the poorest quarter own only one per cent. China’s Gini coefficient for income rose to 0.49 in 2012 from 0.3 over three decades before when it was one of the most egalitarian countries in the world. Another survey put China’s income Gini at 0.61 in 2010, greatly exceeding the US’s 0.45!

 
Republish | | Print | |En español

Related Tags



  • Adil Khan

    Many of us already know these facts. The issue is what do we do to mitigate the widening income gaps both within and across nations especially in a situation where neither the governments nor the countries themselves have much power to alter the dynamics of the current economic system. We are aware that SDGs should guide us to situate frowth within the parameters of equity and sustainability but In addition to being non-binding SDGs are merely a framework of globally agreed development goals that does not specify actions – global and local. Moreover, SDGs’ reliance on a corporate-led growth strategy that is socially and environmentally predatory, to promote economic growth and achieve equity and sustainability seems like a contradiction by itself.

  • Saleh Md Shahriar

    It is nice to read !China is fully aware of income inequality issue.Here in China income inequality , to some extent,is related to regional disparity. The Chinese government has undertaken some programs to address the problems of inequality, disparity, urbanization, climate change & pollutions. Western Development Project is ,for instance, such type of a public policy initiative. Another notable comprehensive program is ‘One Belt,One Road Initiative’. Coastal provinces in China are more developed than those of the northeastern and northwestern regions.In addition, the local governments are implementing many projects in accordance with the local needs, environments and public responses. I have talked to a lot of Chinese common people and elites .They are in fact happy with their lives. Mass perceptions certainly matter. To me,there is an understanding and knowledge gap about Chinese ordinary social,cultural and economic conditions. Existing literature,research reports and academic studies produced mainly in the Western European countries are inadequate to explain the unique situations of China.

  • http://www.schmerltzmag.com/ schmerltzmag.com

    We must continue this trend of widening income chasms between classes. Crush the middle class labor movement and the Makers of society will be unleashed to create prosperity for all. Trust the Captains of Industry.

  • Dwain Holmes

    We retired in a country where there is a large income inequality!
    I have to say this a lot of it is caused by the lack of drive in the people!
    On a small scale We hire locals to help Us!We pay 50% or up to double the going wage!As an example one young Man was working for Us while going to school1/2 days which We convinced Him to do.He worked 4 hours a day and We offered Him 8 hours on Saturday but no He only wanted 4!He was 19 years old and His Mother said He got too tired!I am 78 years old and worked right beside Him!
    Personally know of a European Family whse grandparents at immigrated to Kenya!Back when Blacks took over they had to leave but were one of the last families to do so!They said what hurt the most was that land that had reverted back to the natives 5 years before was back to native brush and had been rich irrigated farm land as their´s was!
    The natives had cried how unfair it was but would not do anything to help them selves!
    Pretty much like 90% of welfare people in the USA

bully to lover books