THE increasing number of worldwide protests on a range of issues is the result of widening inequality, the UN’s Development Programme (UNDP) has suggested in its latest report.
Although there has been progress in tackling poverty, malnutrition, and disease in recent decades, much of this is not being felt by those in poorer parts of the world, the report warns.
Published last month, the 2019 Human Development Report argues that, although living standards are rising, many of the world’s developing nations are missing out on the benefits.
Furthermore, the same populations are experiencing the worst of climate-change impacts and are unable to access technological improvements.
“Inequality is not just about how much someone earns compared to their neighbour,” Achim Steiner, the head of the UNDP, said.
“It is about the unequal distribution of wealth and power: the entrenched social and political norms that are bringing people onto the streets today, and the triggers that will do so in the future unless something changes.”
Although the immediate causes of mass demonstrations in 2019 in Iraq, France, Sudan, Iran, Hong Kong, and Algeria are different, there is a common thread that connects them, the UNDP report suggests.
“Different triggers are bringing people onto the streets — the cost of a train ticket, the price of petrol, demands for political freedoms, the pursuit of fairness and justice,” Mr Steiner writes in the foreword to the report.
“This is the new face of inequality.”
The report highlights findings that 20 per cent of development progress made in 2018 was lost owing to the unequal distribution of things such as healthcare and education. Without access to such services, many in the poorest countries are unable to lift themselves out of poverty sustainably.
“What used to be ‘nice-to-haves’, like going to university or access to broadband, are increasingly important for success, but left only with the basics, people find the rungs knocked out of their ladder to the future,” Pedro Conceição, the head of the team which produced the 366-page report, said.
This degree of contrast is describedin the report. Of 100 children born in the year 2000 in the richer developed world, 55 are now in higher education and just one has died. But of 100 children born in the same year in the poorer developing world, just three are in higher education and 17 died before reaching their 20th birthday.
This inequality is also seen in education — 94 per cent of adults in richer countries received a primary education, compared with just 42 per cent in the developing world — and in access to transformative technologies, such as mobile phones and broadband internet.
In 2017, there were 132 mobile-phone subscriptions for every 100 citizens in the developed world, more than one per person. But in the poorest nations, this figure was more than halved: 67 subscriptions per 100 people. For broadband, the inequality was even greater: 0.8 per cent of people had access to fixed high-speed internet.
Even when things were improving, the lion’s share of the gains were being felt by those in the richer countries. Although life expectancy at age 70 has increased across the board, it is rising at more than twice the rate in the developed world compared with poorer regions.
To tackle this, governments should seek to invest in early-years education, health, and nutrition, to ensure that, as children, people do not lag behind.
The report also notes that countries with more productive workforces tend to avoid the pooling of wealth among a tiny ultra-rich elite. This can be encouraged by pro-trade union policies, minimum wages, a social-security safety-net, and by bringing more women into the workplace.
There is a limited window in which governments can act to halt this growing inequality; so the situation is urgent, the UNDP concludes. “We can redress inequalities if we act now, before imbalances in economic power are politically entrenched.”