THE VEXING PROBLEMS OF 'SHARED PROSPERITY'
The rising tide of economic growth is a bad analogy. Growth is multidimensional. It looks more like a rising see-saw, which can tip some people off ...
Charts and a long article from Dissent.
When growth is accompanied by rising inequality, this matters for the poor in two ways: It reduces or even negates gains in their absolute share that would otherwise result from economic growth. And it also diminishes their relative share. Many things money can buy are positional or competitive: political influence, for instance, and access to education and even health care depend not merely on how much money one has to spend but also on how much others are willing and able to spend on those same goods.
....
Clearly, then, in terms of the more appropriate GNI per capita measure, the developing countries, and the poorest of them especially, have not participated proportionately in global economic growth during the globalization period. In fact, the distance between the richest and the poorest countries has more than doubled, to a staggering 122:1 ratio.
AND
The table shows that, even though the U.S. has the highest per capita GNI (PPP) in the table, its poor have only about half as much income as the poor of Norway and Japan and little more than the Hungarian poor. Taking relative share into account as well, the U.S. poor do much worse than the poor in the other countries. From their standpoint, less economic growth more evenly distributed would have been much better.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Growth and Growh in Inequality - Why it Matters
