Our Take, With Doug Sheridan
The Economist writes, since the Industrial Revolution, rich countries have mostly grown faster than poor ones.
The Economist writes, since the Industrial Revolution, rich countries have mostly grown faster than poor ones. The two decades after around 1995 were an astonishing exception. Gaps in GDP narrowed, extreme poverty plummeted, and global public health and education improved vastly, with a big fall in infant mortality and a rise in school enrollment. Globalization played a big role.
Today, however, those miracles are a faint memory. Extreme poverty has barely fallen since 2015. Measures of global public health improved only slowly in the late 2010s, and then went into decline after the pandemic.
Depending on where you draw the line between rich and poor countries, the worst-off have stopped growing faster than richer ones, or are even falling further behind. For the more than 700MM people who are still in extreme poverty—and the 3 billion who are merely poor—this is all grim news.
Much of the problem is due to a lack of focus on what works. The International Monetary Fund and The World Bank are juggling promoting reform and development with fighting climate change and other progressive causes. Aid budgets have been squeezed, hurting global public-health campaigns. Cash has been diverted from helping the poorest to greening power grids.
The biggest problem, though, is that home-grown reform has ground to a halt. With some notable exceptions, the world’s leaders are more interested in state control, industrial policy and protectionism than the examples of the 1990s—and it is no accident that such policies boost their own power.
In the past, Western ideas ideas spread because communism was proved backward compared to America’s prosperity and power. Today, poorer countries instead look to the Chinese model of industrial policy and state-owned enterprises, drawing entirely the wrong lessons from the country’s growth.
To Sum It Up: The world will pay for its failure to learn from history. Rich countries will cope, as they usually do, but conditions are in decline as gov'ts of all stripes reject the principles that powered a golden era. Nobody will suffer more as a result than the world’s poor.
Our Take: It's no surprise that progress in poorer countries halted in 2015. That's the year the world adopted the Paris Climate Agreement. Since then, rich nations have spent lavishly on schemes within their own borders designed to cool the planet and halt the rise of the oceans. In the process, the cause of the world's poorest has been put on the back burner. Human kind is worse off for it. What a shameful mess this climate-change panic has been
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