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Left behind: domestic inequalities and the fate of the poor.

Article Excerpt
By the United Nations Development Program

EVEN FOR COUNTRIES that on average have made good progress towards the Millennium Development Goals designed to cut in half the worst manifestations of global poverty, domestic inequality often runs high. In countries throughout the world, both where economies are growing and where they are stagnant, there are plentiful examples of increasing or lingering gaps--where entire areas or groups (or both) have been left behind in one or more spheres of development.

CHINA: FAST PROGRESS, DRIVEN BY THE COASTLAND

China is among the few countries performing well overall on the indicators for the Millennium Development Goals. Yet in recent decades China has shown large disparities in economic and social outcomes between coastal and inland regions--a trend that also reflects cleavages between urban and rural areas.

Coastal areas have consistently experienced the fastest economic growth: between 1978 and 1998 per capita incomes increased by an astonishing 11 percent a year. Ignoring inflation, that means that $100 in 1978 would have jumped to $800 just 20 years later. Moreover, the performance of coastal areas sped up in the 1990s, with annual growth averaging 13 percent--five times the level in China's slowest-growing northwestern regions, which are far from the commercially thriving coast. As a result, the bulk of national income is concentrated in metropolitan and coastal regions. The wealth of coastal areas--with their large ports and harbor cities I owes much to exports.

In 1999, China's three richest metropolises--Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin--stood at the top of the human development index (HDI, a United Nations Development Program measure of well-being that takes into account a wide range of factors not limited to per capita income) ranking. Those at the bottom were all Western provinces. Moreover, the poorest provinces have the highest inequality. Tibet had the lowest values for education attainment and life expectancy. In income, education and health, only some parts of China will achieve the Millennium Development Goals, leaving behind the vast inland areas--and particularly the Western provinces.

BRAZIL: LEAVING THE NORTH BEHIND?

Brazil has a long legacy of high inequalities. The richest 10 percent of households have 70 times the income of the poorest 10 percent. Over the past 10 years, illiteracy rates have been widening between the richest and poorest states.

And though poverty started to decline in the early 1990s, it did so...

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