Nachhaltiges Europa Abschlusspublikation - Global Marshall Plan

Nachhaltiges Europa
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and India's from 3 per cent to 5 per cent over the
same period.
By 2001 China's real GDP per head, at purchasing
power parity, was still only 15 per cent of US
levels, up from 5 per cent in 1978. India's real
GDP per head was still only 7 per cent of US levels
in 2001. Some now expect China and India to
have done the major part of their catching up by
2050, even though the growth levels this would
require are very high. As the past impediments to
competition are reduced – be they isolation,
bureaucracy or Maoism - many think that they are
capable of these high growth levels (with all the
issues for the environment that this entails, but
that is another discussion).
So competition is good, and a winning attitude is
healthy, but we should be realistic enough to ad-
mit that we are not going to win everything, but
that we will benefit from the world-wide competitive
process. When our political leaders committed
at Lisbon to making Europe the “most competitive
and dynamic knowledge-based society in the
world, with more and better jobs, and increased
social cohesion” they did not make the mistake of
saying we must be the most competitive at everything.
It was much more a comment on the type
of focus - the choice of Olympic event to concen-
trate our resources on doing well in - whilst recognising
that in future we will be one competitor
amongst many.
Now let us return to the concern for sustainable
development flowing from a world where competition
is more and more borderless. One of the fears
about globalisation – or borderlessness – is that it
does not benefit the poor. Noam Chomsky put it in
a way which many can identify with when he said
in 2001 “Inequality is soaring through the global-
isation period - within countries and across countries.
That's expected to continue."
But Professor Martin Wolf, formerly an economist
with the World Bank, has put his finger on the
right riposte to this when he says:
We need first to ask what matters more, inequality
or poverty? The answer for the great majority of
people must be the latter. [poverty] Many people
would prefer more equality to less, but few would
prefer a world of uniform poverty to one of un-
equal wealth, provided the [inequality inherent in
the] latter brought a reduction in destitution in its
train. Fortunately, the evidence that the world has
been achieving a big fall in the proportion of destitute
people and a significant fall in the absolute
numbers of the destitute is strong. Indeed, with
the recent acceleration in the rates of growth of
large poor countries - above all, China, and, to a
lesser extent, India - both global inequality and
poverty have been falling.
Thus if we compare the April 2004 World Development
Indicators from the World Bank, it tran-
spires that the numbers in extreme poverty, defined
by the Bank's poverty line of $1 a day, at
1993 purchasing power parity, fell from 1.5bn in
1981 to 1.2bn in 1990 and 1.1bn in 2001. As a
proportion of the population of developing countries,
the decline was from 39.5 per cent in 1981
to 27.9 per cent in 1990 and 21.3 per cent in
2001. Let me repeat that heartening set of figures:
the proportion of the population of developing
countries in extreme poverty has gone, in suc-
cessive decades since 1980, from 40% to 30% to
20%, more or less. If it were not for the impact of
AIDS in Africa I would feel confident that we were
on our way, albeit in an unpredictable world, to
eliminating extreme poverty.
So when the World Commission on the Social Dimension
of Globalisation points to sad develop-
ments like this: „In 1960, per capita GDP in the
richest 20 countries was 18 times that in the poorest
20 countries. By 1995, this gap had widened to
37 times.“ Or this: „In 1960, the ratio between the
richest 20% of world population and the poorest
was 20%. In 1998, it had surpassed 70.“ (UNDP
1998, cited in German Bundestag 14/9200, 2002)
This in some ways allows the tut-tutting about the
wealthy to give a distorted picture of the reality.
The reality is that where once vast numbers were
swimming around in a sea of poverty – the below
$1 a day mark – today, more and more have
clambered on to the life-raft. That is the most im-
portant thing – both in absolute terms and proportionately
there are many more on the life-raft than
there used to be, and instead of the life-raft
getting overcrowded and dangerous it is growing
all the time so that there is room for more. That is
why we are on course to meet the Millenium De-
velopment Goal of a halving in absolute poverty by
2015. But it is true that the second most important
thing to note is that those who are not yet on
the life-raft are drifting further away from it. If we
are going to eliminate absolute poverty altogether
something has to be done to correct that. That is
largely for another discussion too. What is impor-
tant for today is that it is difficult to argue that
what is at fault and causing them to drift
away from safety is the very system under which
so many have already been rescued. It is difficult
to say that globalisation is to blame, rather than
other factors. What other factors? We could get
into the blame game here, and say that if some of
these countries lack the necessary conditions for
development that must be bound up with colonial