A better world is possible - Global Commons Institute

Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only.
www.brucenixon.com
Section D - Poverty and economic injustice
In writing this section, I am much indebted to David Woodward and his report for the New Economics
Foundation report, “Growth isn’t working”, January, 2006.
Growth isn’t working. Vandana Shiva calls the current credo of global institutions, national and regional
governments and big business: mono-thinking and mono-culture. It is mono-everything. This one size fits all
policy requires continuous economic growth, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - a misnomer, as
really it is Gross Domestic Cost (GDC). It also demands unfettered free trade. That flies in the face of
economic history. Nascent economies require protection. Trade liberalisation has not brought the benefits
we were given to expect. Growing wealth is concentrated in fewer people.
Rapid economic growth is far too slow in reducing poverty. If global GDP per capita continued to grow at
around 2% pa, it would take more than a century to reduce poverty below the $1- a - day level. Between
1990 and 2001 the incomes of those below $1 a day grew only half as fast as global GDP. If this trend were to
continue, their incomes would rise by only 1% per year, and the process to reduce poverty below the $1- a -
day level would take more than 200 years, and require the global economy to expand to more than 60 times
its current size even without population growth .
Continuous economic growth isn’t working
Until the eighties the poverty gap was closing
Between 1990 and 2001, for every $100 of growth in the World’s per person income, only $0.60
contributed to reducing poverty below the $1 - a - day level
UK growth benefits the richest 10 % 10 times as much as the poorest 10 %
UK top executives earn nearly 100 times more than a typical employee. Ten years ago the differential
was 39
US CEOs were paid 344 times more than workers in 2008,up from 104 in 1991
The wealth of the world's 475 billionaires is now more than the combined income of the bottom half
of humanity
The richest 1% of adults in the world own 40% of the planet's wealth
More wealth does not = more happiness – beyond a certain point
Where the income gap is highest so are all the measures of unhappiness
A recent UN-Habitat report said the wealth gap is creating a social time bomb of unrest and increased
mortality.
India has dramatic poverty after sixty years of independence. It is not being helped by large corporations or
the industrialisation of agriculture. Well over 100,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1993, largely as
a result of debt and failed GM crops. Globalisation is certainly not working for the 73 per cent of Indians
dependant on agriculture or the 280m poor living in India’s 600,000 villages or the slums of Mumbai. Often,
the process of rapid economic development deprives poor people of the land – the only thing they can
depend on for their living. Compensation for the loss of land is useless.
New Delhi authorities, in their attempts to westernise their city by sweeping food stalls off the streets, are
destroying a source of cheap, nourishing food and putting poor people out of work. What replaces street
food will be more expensive and less healthy “fast food”. There is also a battle going on between those who
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