Socialist Appeal's economics correspondent Michael Roberts looks behind the statistics contained in the UN's Human Development Report…

Global capitalism, world poverty

It's 200,000 Hutu refugees from the civil war in Burundi and Rwanda are staggering on through an insect­infected, disease­ridden Congo jungle in extreme heat, desperately looking for food. They will have little time, or will, to celebrate this date in the Christian calendar, although many are at least formally Christians, another product of the mark left by Belgian imperialism along with poverty and ethnic violence.

It's Christmas. And the stockbrokers and money traders of the City of London are celebrating record bonuses from the profits made by their companies in 1996 ­ a year when Wall St and the FTSE stock market indexes rocketed to new heights, producing a bonanza of goodies for the few not seen since the heady days of the Thatcherite 'big bang' of the late 1980s. This staggering contrast between the lives of the many in Africa and the few in the wealthier industrial countries is not new news. But the sheer magnitude of the chasm between the world's masses and the ruling class elite throughout the world is often difficult to comprehend.

The United Nations may yet again have failed the people of Rwanda just as it has done for the masses in Bosnia, East Timor or Mogadishu, but at least its statisticians have made a small contribution. They have recently published their Human Development Report. This outlines a swathe of facts and figures to document the immensity of the injustice, inequality and exploitation that is meted out on the majority by the minority across the globe, as of 1996.

Free market

Most human beings are in a bad way, and it is not getting better, according to the UN's economists, whatever the preachers of the "free market" say and whatever the complacent platitudes mouthed by the world's capitalist political leaders. So at the risk of boring you to death with figures, let me give you a flavour of what the UN has found about the state of homo sapiens in the 1990s. Since the end of the great world capitalist boom in 1974, growth in real economic output has fallen in 100 countries, with 1.6bn or one­third of the world's population. Since 1980, 1.5bn people in just 15 countries have seen faster growth. In 70 countries, average incomes are lower than they were in 1980, and in 43 countries they are lower than in 1970!

The worst falls have been in the ex­Stalinist countries of Eastern Europe, where 21 countries have had falls of over 20% in just four years. At the same time, the world has become more polarised between rich and poor. The world generates $23 trillion a year. But $18 trillion comes from the 26 OECD countries and only $5 trillion from the rest, who house 80% of the population. The poorest 20% of the world's population saw their share of global income fall from a miserly 2.3% in 1963 to a minuscule 1.4% in 1993. Yet the share of the richest 20% rose from a massive 70% to a gigantic 85%! Thus the ratio of rich to poor in the world doubled from 30 to 1 to 61 to 1. The extreme is revealed in just one statistic: that just

358 people have more assets than the incomes of 45% of the world's people! Okay, that is not comparing like with like, as your wealth is not the same as your annual income. But if you compared those billionaires' wealth with the wealth of the poor, the comparison would be even worse, because the world's poor have no wealth to speak of at all, just their power of labour. I continue. There's much more to come. Those experiencing growth in national income per head that was faster than 5% a year has risen from just 12% of the world in 193 to 27% now, but those experiencing falling income per head has tripled from 5% to 18%. So the gap widens. Average income per head in the OECD is about $20,000. In developing countries it is $4,600, a gap that has tripled in a generation. But where growth has been achieved in the last 30 years, it has not helped most people in those countries. Between 1965­80, in the golden age of capitalism, 200m people saw their incomes fall. In the last 15 years, more than 1 billion people did.

Advances

There have been some advances for the mass of people. In the last 30 years, life expectancy has increased by more than one­third, and in 30 countries is now over 70 years. And the number of people with access to safe water has doubled from 36% to 70%. But 17m still die each year from curable diseases and there are now 18m HIV­infected people, 90% of whom are in developing countries. Primary education is now available to 77% of the world's population from 48% in 1960, but there are still 130m without any schooling and 275m with no secondary education. Food production per head has risen 20% in the last decade but 800m still do not get enough food and another 500m are chronically undernourished. Maternal mortality in developing countries is still 17 times greater than in the OECD, while more than one­third of all the world's children do not get enough to eat and infant mortality is still five times greater in poor countries. And the divisions in the quality

of life are just as great within the richer industrial capitalist countries as they are between the industrial countries and the so­called developing world. One­third of all adults in the OECD countries do not have any educational qualifications whatever. The poorest 40% of households get only 18% of the income. More than 100m people live below their countries' official poverty line in industrial countries. And it's going to get worse unless something changes, according to the UN. Poverty will deepen in the poorest countries with income per head falling to just $325 by the end of the next generation, while income per head in the richest countries will double. At present rates, it would take fast­growing China another 50 years to catch up with OECD incomes, and slower­growing India 150 years! In other words, never. And inequality within countries is rising. The average income of an American citizen is four times greater than the poorest 20% of Americans. That compares with just a two to one ratio in more equal Japan. This gap widened most of all in Britain in the last 30 years. Now the richest 20% in Britain

earn ten times more than the poorest 20%. Wealth is also distributed unequally, according to the UN data. In 'egalitarian' Sweden, the richest 1% of households own 20% of the nation's assets, and in the US the richest 1 % increased their ownership of assets from 20% in 1975 to a staggering 36% in 1990.

Weak

And capitalist growth is not only weak, uneven and unequal. It is damaging the planet and its inhabitants. Capitalist violence and wars left nearly 27m people as refugees in 1994 (before the latest Zairian exodus), an elevenfold increase since 1970. So much for the great "New World Order" after the end of the Cold War. Today, one in every 200 people is either a refugee or forcibly displaced from his or her country of origin. In developing countries, water supply per head is only one-third of what it was in 1970. About 8­10m acres of forest is lost every year. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 65m hectares of productive land have disappeared in the last 50 years. Around 700m people suffer from indoor smoke because of the lack of chimneys in their homes.

In the last 25 years, so­called natural disasters have affected three billion people and killed 7m and injured another 2m. In industrial countries too the environment is being destroyed. Air pollution causes $35bn worth of economic costs every year and about 60% of Europe's forests are damaged by acid rain. But most of the damage affects the poor. While the US and the former Soviet Union accounted for nearly one­third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, it's Bangladesh that it most likely to be damaged. It will lose 17% of its land as the sea rises due to global warming. What's the answer of capitalism to this study of inequality, deprivation and misery? More capitalism.

Once the world is fully integrated into the "free market" and the planet is one great global market place for traders and entrepreneurs, everything in the worldly garden will be lovely, the ideologists of capitalism argue. That's ridiculous, of course, and they don't really believe it themselves. But the propaganda is essential to keep people from thinking of alternatives that might damage the interests of the rich few who benefit from this capitalist nightmare. Capitalist ideology now centres on an economic buzzword ­ globalisation. Since 1965 world trade in goods has tripled and trade in services has grown fourteen­fold! Now every day over $1 trillion circulates the world's financial markets searching ceaselessly (24 hours non­stop) and endlessly for a better return and a quick buck.

Prosperity

This is the way forward to prosperity, we are told. But of course, this growth in trade and money is not evenly spread. The poorest countries containing 20% of the world's people have seen their share of global trade fall from 4% to under 1%. Of all the world's flows of money capital they get just 0.2%! Of the flow of capital to the developing world last year, around $175bn, 75% went to just ten countries. So there we have it. A capitalist world that is getting more capitalist every day as the tentacles of finance and industrial capital seek out new areas and people to exploit in the search for profit. But more profit does not produce more prosperity, except for an infinitesimally small minority ­ remember just 358 people have more assets than 45% of all human beings! The United Nations has produced the damning evidence of capitalism's failure. The spreading rule of capital across the world over 200 years has brought with it better health (for some), better education (for some), and better technology (for some). But now even those benefits look exhausted. People are getting poorer (on the whole) and the planet is getting more damaged (on the whole). Happy Christmas.

From Socialist Appeal 47, Dec 1996