Let’s consider the case of two just-born male children (for corresponding females, disparities would be even more dramatic). At birth, all talk of personal responsibility just makes no sense. Family, social stratum and the place one is born into are simply not chosen. You choose only to be close to your mother. If you are born in a high-income country, then you don’t have to worry about dying before your first birthday, you can expect to attend 12 years of school, and to live until you’re 80. Moreover, in due course, you will feel entitled to have a PC and a cell phone (not to mention running water and a working sewage system), and it’s likely you will be able to get a bank loan to start a business venture or spend your holidays in exotic lands. But if you are born in a poor country, like most of Subsaharan Africa today, your expectations will be radically different. You will live less than 50 years, you’ll receive just one year of schooling, and you will consider drinking water a luxury. That is, if you have made it to your first birthday: in many African countries, if the family is poor and rural, and the mother is illiterate, one child out of five won’t see the end of his/her first year of life.
It is interesting to note that holding levels of personal income constant (and adjusting them for purchasing power differences, which means expressing them in PPP dollars), levels of education and life expectancy vary widely across poor countries. For instance, Vietnam and Lesotho have similar income per capita levels (as measured in 2004), but the former has a life expectancy of 71 years, while the latter of only 35.
A worrying aspect is the existence of vicious circles holding countries back: economic, social, and political inequalities tend to reproduce and reinforce each other. Being born in poor environments means not being able to go to school and having to start working at an early age; it ultimately means seeing one’s rights denied or violated, and, finally, dying prematurely. It’s not that there are no opportunities to escape the poverty trap. But that these are available to very few people.
In 2000, the international community made a commitment to reach a series of targets to reduce the impact and scale of global inequality. Millennium Development Goals have set quantitative objectives on poverty, nutrition, health, education, gender disparity, and other socioeconomic variable, to be met by 2015. Many countries have adopted apt policies and are on the right track. Some will even hit their targets before 2015. But several countries have made little progress over the last decade, while others have even worsened their performance with respect to social indicators.
Many are the causes determining such a yawning gap in living standards among countries. Crucial is the absence of functioning institutions – especially a functioning legal system with a good judiciary, as well as capable and reasonably honest politicians and administrators. Countries really need to strive for higher equality, both vis-à-vis other countries and within themselves. They cannot wait for higher equality to be handed from outside. If you care about such a crucial topic, then read the World Development Report compiled by each year by the World Bank. The 2006 edition is titled “Equity and Development” and can be downloaded at www.worldbank.org.
by Carlo Filippini,
Full Professor of Economics and Director of ISESAO, Bocconi’s Center for Socio-Economic Studies on East Asia