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And nor are things getting any better. In 1960, the wealthiest 20 per cent of the
world’s population, living in the richest countries, had 30 times the income of the poorest
20 per cent; in 1997, the figure had increased to 74 times. 4
Not only are the rich countries getting richer and the poor getting poorer, but the
gap between individuals is widening too. On 18 December 1999, the New Zealand
newspaper The Dominion featured a picture of Bill Gates under the title ‘The Rich Get
Richer’. It said his personal stake in Microsoft of US$85 billion was already greater than
the GDP of many countries. To put this in perspective, the article pointed out that the
GDP of Portugal was $US85 billion while that of Ireland was US$81 billion. 5 Martin Khor,
Director of Third World Network, an independent research organisation based in
Malaysia, writes:
‘Economic gains have benefited greatly a few countries, at the expense of many,’ says the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP). The old cliché, that the poor get poorer and the rich
richer, is unfortunately well backed up with fact after fact. In the past three decades, 1.6 billion
people were left behind or became more poor. ‘And the very rich are getting richer,’ the UNDP
report says. To illustrate, it estimates that the assets of the world’s 358 billionaires exceed the
combined annual incomes of countries accounting for 2.3 billion people, or nearly half (45%) of the
world’s people. UNDP chief, Gus Speth, concludes that the world has become more economically
polarised, and ‘if present trends continue, disparities between industrial and developing nations
will move from inequitable to inhuman’. A commentary on these statistics in the London­based
daily, The Guardian, was even more frank and scathing. Noting in bold headlines that ‘358 people
own as much wealth as half the world’s population’, the paper’s journalist Victor Keegan called it
‘highway robbery by the super­rich’.