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RICHEST 500
Debates about trends in global income distribution continue
to rage. Less open to debate is the sheer scale of inequality.
The world’s richest 500 individuals have a combined income
greater than that of the poorest 416 million. Beyond these extremes,
the 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day—40
percent of the world’s population— account for 5
percent of global income. The richest 10 percent, almost all
of whom live in high-income countries, account for 54 percent.
An obvious corollary of extreme global inequality is that even
modest shifts in distribution from top to bottom could have
dramatic effects on poverty.
Using a global income distribution database, we estimate a cost
of $300 billion for lifting 1 billion people living on less
than $1 a day above the extreme poverty line threshold. That
amount represents 1.6 percent of the income of the richest 10
percent of the world’s population. Of course, this figure
describes a static transfer. Achieving sustainable poverty reduction
requires dynamic processes through which poor countries and
poor people can produce their way out of extreme deprivation.
But in our highly unequal world greater equity would provide
a powerful catalyst for poverty reduction and progress toward
the millennium development goals (MDGs).
What are the implications of the current global human development
trajectory for the MDGs? We address this question by using country
data to project where the world will be in relation to some
of the main MDGs by 2015.
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