The Atlas of Global Inequalities - Softcover

Crow, Ben; Lodha, Suresh K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520268229 ISBN 13: 9780520268227

Publisher: University of California Press, 2011

Synopsis

Drawing on research from around the world, this atlas gives shape and meaning to statistics, making it an indispensable resource for understanding global inequalities and an inspiration for social and political action. Inequality underlies many of the challenges facing the world today, and The Atlas of Global Inequalities considers the issue in all its dimensions. Organized in thematic parts, it maps not only the global distribution of income and wealth, but also inequalities in social and political rights and freedoms. It describes how inadequate health services, unsafe water, and barriers to education hinder people’s ability to live their lives to the full; assesses poor transport, energy, and digital communication infrastructures and their effect on economic development; and highlights the dangers of unclean and unhealthy indoor and outdoor environments. Through world, regional, and country maps, and innovative and intriguing graphics, the authors unravel the complexity of inequality, revealing differences between countries as well as illustrating inequalities within them.

Topics include: the discrimination suffered by children with a disability; the impact of inefficient and dangerous household fuels on the daily lives and long-term health of those who rely on them; the unequal opportunities available to women; and the reasons for families’ descent into, and reemergence from, poverty.

About this title

About the Author

Ben Crow is the author of books including The Food Question, Markets, Class and Social Change, and Sharing the Ganges. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Suresh K. Lodha is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published more than 100 articles in journals and conferences.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Atlas of Global Inequalities

By Ben Crow, Suresh K. Lodha, Jannet King, Candida Lacey, Dawn Sackett

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Myriad Editions Limited
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-26822-7

Contents

Authors, 1, 
Acknowledgments, 8, 
Introduction, 9, 
1 Economic Inequalities, 14, 
2 Power Inequalities, 26, 
3 Social Inequalities, 38, 
4 Inequalities of Access, 50, 
5 Health Inequalities, 66, 
6 Educational Inequalities, 78, 
7 Environmental Inequalities, 86, 
8 Towards Equality, 96, 
9 Data, Definitions & Sources, 100, 
Definitions, 118, 
Sources, 119, 
Index, 126, 

CHAPTER 1

Economic Inequalities

* Economic differences are the most common focus of study and comment, partly because they are most easily measured. They are given prominence at the beginning of this atlas, however, because they are a major underlying driver of many of the social inequalities covered in the rest of the book.

The wealthiest tenth of the global population receives 58 percent of annual incomes, and owns 71 percent of household wealth – assets, property and capital. And while the average income of the richest decile is 94 times that of the poorest, the ratio between the average household wealth of the richest and poorest deciles is an almost unimaginable 175,750:1.

Redressing the negative effects of income and wealth inequality is complicated, not least because the social processes involved in raising productivity and living standards also create inequalities. The global system of capitalism has been successful in harnessing technical and social innovation to generate increased productivity. This has enabled higher living standards, notably in the industrial countries but much less so in the developing world. This uneven pattern of industrialization is the main reason why income inequality between countries rose from about 3:1 in 1800 to 72:1 in 1992.

Capitalism also generates inequalities within countries, giving some great wealth, others meager wages, and still others unemployment. Although some parts of Europe have less income inequality than the USA or Brazil, the extent to which capitalism is compatible with economic equality is debatable. Capitalism operates through the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few – a process that is speeded by low wages and unemployment. Currently, 2 percent of the world's population owns half the world's wealth. Huge armies of the poor face insecurity and low returns in the informal sector in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The processes of accumulation and exploitation interact with many other causes of inequality, including exclusions such as racism, to create diverse patterns of wealth, consumption, work, and unemployment. In turn, these inequalities constrain many individual freedoms and capabilities. The rich, to give an obvious example, have command over magnificent homes, art, culture, beauty, and much else besides, while most of the poor cannot keep their food cold.

Economic inequality can be reduced through labor migration, although barriers to mobility are especially high for poor people, and people with low skills, despite the demand for their labor in many rich countries. Sadly, forces of exclusion, such as racism and nationalism, stand in the way of the equalizing potential of migration. All rich countries have erected barriers against people crossing borders to seek work.

Income

* Most debates about global inequality focus on income inequality. National incomes can be measured using Gross Domestic Product – the total of goods and services produced in that economy – or Gross National Income (GNI), which includes income earned outside the country. These are measures of output or the value of production, not wages, but when divided by the number of people in the country they roughly equate to the average individual's ability to buy goods, to their standard of living. Combining this with data on income distribution within a country creates a powerful picture of economic inequalities.

Income inequality between countries grew in the last 200 years as some countries industrialized. Industry produces cheaper goods and pays better wages than farming. Until the beginning of the 19th century, income (GDP per capita) differences between countries were relatively small, but the industrializing countries pulled ahead of societies that depended primarily on agriculture, and a large income gap opened up.

Income inequality within a country can be measured by the Gini coefficient. South America is notable for its high level of inequality, while the countries of Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, albeit with very different economic histories, have the most equal income distribution.

The industrialization of China and India is beginning to raise average incomes in those countries, although inequalities within both countries are growing. Many economies in Africa and Asia are building industrial capabilities only slowly, however, and the gap between average incomes in those countries and the industrialized west continues to rise.

Household Wealth

* Household wealth – the total value of physical and financial assets, including dwellings, livestock and land, less any debt – is highly concentrated. In 2000, around 10 percent of the world's population possessed over 85 percent of world wealth.

Research on economic inequality predominantly focuses on disparities of income or consumption, yet the distribution of household wealth is even more unequal than that of income. Wealth is accumulated over time, so income differences tend to be amplified.

An assessment of household wealth provides different insights from those gained from measurements of income. Wealth enables poor households, for example, to survive unexpected events such as a natural disaster or prolonged illness, which might adversely affect their ability to provide for family members. While some assets, like livestock, may be vulnerable in a natural disaster, others, like land, may enable households to generate money for their survival.

Most households in the world own very little. A household with more than $2,100 is in the top half of the global distribution. China dominates the fourth to eighth deciles in the global wealth distribution because the ownership of land, housing and other goods is more equal, partly as a result of socialist land reforms, than in other areas such as South Asia.

Improvements in the quality and collection of wealth-related data is badly needed for further studies, especially in those countries in Africa, Asia, and South America where household balance sheets were not available for the 2000 survey.

Consumption

* Inequalities in global spending are stark. The richest fifth of the world's population are responsible for 77 percent of all spending by households on goods and services, and the poorest fifth a miniscule 1.5 percent – a distribution that has barely changed since the mid-1990s.

For a household to have an adequate standard of living, it needs to spend money on food, clothing, housing, medical care, and education. However, many poor households are forced to spend a large share – an average of over 50 percent in many low-income countries – of their income on food alone. By contrast, in high-income, industrialized countries, expenditure on food might represent only 10 percent of household income, although the actual amount spent may be more than 10 times greater than the amount spent by those in poorer countries.

People face deprivation even in industrialized countries, where more than 100 million people are reported homeless. In the USA, where more food is consumed per person than anywhere else in the world, nearly 7 million households reported going hungry at some point during 2008.

In non-industrialized countries, about a fifth of all people are undernourished, and a quarter do not have adequate housing. Ownership of household assets such as refrigerators, televisions, cell phones and cars is concentrated in the wealthiest groups.

Raising the consumption levels of more than a billion poor people is as important as moving towards sustainable consumption patterns that reduce environmental damage and promote product safety and the rights of consumers.

Work & Unemployment

* Around the globe, there are differences in the ways labor is mobilized, the productivity of that work, and the lives work makes possible through its remuneration. Coercive forms of work, notably slavery, forced labor and debt bondage, have declined in the last 200 years.

The number of people employed in agriculture has declined as a result of mechanization and the increasing number of jobs in manufacturing, mining, power generation, and construction. More recently, the more "advanced" economies have moved away from the manufacture of goods, towards the provision of services such as marketing, finance, and legal expertise. A comparison of the proportion of people employed in agriculture, industry and services, and the contribution those sectors make to a country's GDP, reveals the contribution made by workers in each sector to the economy.

Most people in industrialized economies work in formal, contracted, regulated employment, but in most developing countries the majority work informally, in unregulated work, producing and selling goods on a small scale. The nature of this work makes reliable data hard to find.

Unemployment is a major source of inequality and deprivation, particularly throughout most of the non-industrial world, where there is little support for the unemployed. Unemployment levels have risen dramatically since the onset of the recession in 2007, but global data on this change is not yet available.

Work provides more than remuneration. It may, for example, bestow status. Gender differences in the level of unemployment often reflect power inequalities – most strikingly in the Middle East.

Labor Migration

* People migrate to seek higher incomes, better work, Hainan access to higher education, and better healthcare. Labor migration leads to the expansion of human freedoms, so it can reduce global inequality. It has been suggested that migration could be an alternative to foreign aid. People from countries with the least development (measured by HDI) often have the most to gain from labor migration.

Those who have the most to gain from migration, however, are least likely, or able, to migrate. Poverty is a significant constraint to emigration. Those in the poorest countries, and the poorest people within countries, are less able to migrate and, despite high demand for their low-skilled labor, encounter numerous barriers to their migration.

Those who do migrate achieve higher incomes than those who stay home. They are able to send money home as remittances, which directly increases opportunities and freedoms for their families. Globally, the money that migrants send home is more than twice as large as foreign aid, and for many countries remittances are the largest source of foreign exchange.

Not everyone who migrates does so for economic purposes. Conflict-induced migration and forced migration also contribute to the overall flows of labor migration. There were some 42 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2008.

CHAPTER 2

Power Inequalities

* The division of the world into bounded societies under the authority of national governments, which emerged over the last two centuries, has been challenged in the last few decades by the growing interconnectedness of people and their activities. This process of global integration has diverse implications, from the apparent diminution of the power of national governments, through the rise of new global financial and environmental challenges, to questions about the adequacy of global representation, and the rising importance of global economic discourse and ideology.

Nonetheless, national governments remain the dominant actors, and those that have industrialized are the most influential, with global power roughly corresponding to overall economic output. Fueled by the industrial revolution, the share of the world GDP contributed by the West has grown over the last two centuries, but since the beginning of the 21st century the hierarchy of power has begun to change with the rapid industrialization of the two massive economies of China and India. Countries that have been unable to industrialize have much less influence. Those with only a small number of exportable goods face an uphill struggle for foreign exchange and industrialization.

The government of the largest economy, the USA, frequently acts as if it were the government of the world. On other occasions, self-appointed groups of industrialized countries, the G5, G8, and G20, make global decisions on certain topics, while avoiding discussion of others. Thus, these governments exercise ideological power by influencing the framework of desires and goals. They control the public agenda, and dominate international agreements on issues such as trade tariffs, intellectual property laws, agricultural subsidies, international aid, and military assistance.

Military spending dwarfs spending on health and education in many countries. In OECD countries, it also overshadowed development assistance by a factor of around 10:1 in 2005. Greater possibilities for increased freedom and capabilities can emerge at local, national, and global levels if expenditure is directed to the improvement of equality of daily living conditions and security.

The most intimate forms of power, in the home, over language and at work, are also influenced by government action and global ideas. These forms of power are difficult to map, although this section does explore how the power of citizens influences government, through the rise of democratic forms of government, and how the modern state exercises social control via imprisonment and execution.

International Trade

* International trade is a powerful factor in determining the extent to which poor countries are able to share equally in global prosperity. The benefits of trade are, however, unevenly distributed, partly because industrialized countries maintain trade barriers in the form of high tariffs against goods from poor countries while maintaining mutually favorable terms with other rich countries.

The percentage of total exports represented by manufactured goods is one indicator of prosperity. By this measure, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are falling behind. Although most industrial countries, including the USA, followed policies to protect their infant industries as they were industrializing, that route is now discouraged by international financial organizations, including the IMF and WTO, which promote free trade.

This dissemination of global ideas in favor of free trade and against the protection of "infant industries" may have reduced the capacity of poorer economies to diversify and to promote industrial production. Some developing countries depend on a limited number of agricultural commodity exports, making them vulnerable to volatile and falling prices. Free trade ideas have done little, however, to restrain rich countries from subsidizing their own agricultural production, the surplus from which is "dumped" overseas, undercutting local producers.

Power is also exercised by rich countries through the imposition of rules on intellectual property rights, making the transfer of technology expensive for poor countries, and raising the price of medicines, which adversely affects the health of the poor.

Budget Priorities

* The ratio of government expenditure on the military to that on education and health is a rough but revealing indicator of social priorities. Local conflicts and global tensions have some influence on raising expenditure on the military and reducing the ratio between social and military spending, but so does an absence of governmental or societal concern for health and education.

A small number of mostly small states have managed without overt military forces. In many cases, these countries also have high levels of social spending, often with markedly positive impacts on reducing inequalities and improving well-being. Some states, such as Costa Rica, manage to combine high well-being with relatively low government spending and low economic growth.

From the late 1970s, the rise of neo-liberalism, which seeks to minimize the role of the state and maximize the private business sector, encouraged governments across the globe to privatize state industries and reduce state spending. Healthcare, education and social security were disproportionately cut, while many states protected military spending. These ideas led to widespread austerity. An increase in inequalities followed, with women in many poor households taking on extra work to substitute for lost livelihoods, and to pay for education, health and social support.

Social spending is higher in industrial countries than in the developing world, but better basic safety nets could prevent illness and other personal disasters causing a rapid descent into poverty for those living on a financial knife edge.

Government Action

* Diverse forms of government action, from wage laws to taxation, and the provision of education and healthcare to the redistribution of land, seek to address inequality. Such actions from those in power are usually in response to pressures, representations and movements from, among others, workers, minorities, peasants and women. They include a range of measures, both coercive and persuasive.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Atlas of Global Inequalities by Ben Crow, Suresh K. Lodha, Jannet King, Candida Lacey, Dawn Sackett. Copyright © 2011 Myriad Editions Limited. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520268229
• ISBN 13: 9780520268227
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128