Unit 23 Inequality Among Nations PDF

UNIT 23 INEQUALITY AMONG NATIONS Structure 23.1 Introduction 23.2 Nature and Pattern of Inequality 23.2.1 Some Evidence on Inequality 23.2.2 Defining Inequality and Poverty 23.2.3 Approaches to Measuring Inequality 23.2.4 Inequality and Development: Differing...

UNIT 23 INEQUALITY AMONG NATIONS Structure 23.1 Introduction 23.2 Nature and Pattern of Inequality 23.2.1 Some Evidence on Inequality 23.2.2 Defining Inequality and Poverty 23.2.3 Approaches to Measuring Inequality 23.2.4 Inequality and Development: Differing Views 23.3 Inequality: Major Causes 23.3.1 Uneven International Economic System 23.3.2 Power Game in International Politics 23.3.3 Emerging Labour Markets and Skill Differentials 23.4 Inequality: Effects and Consequences 23.5 Strategy to Reduce Inequality 23.6 Summary 23.7 Exercises 23.8 Glossary 23.1 INTRODUCTION In the broad theory and practice of international relations, no less significant has been the subset of economic relations among nations over the centuries. During 19th Century, for instance, classical dictum ‘Trade as an Engine of Economic Growth’ dominated the economic thinking and had a persuasive appeal and a wider acceptability among the nations. Second, inequality among nations was not despicable since it was considered as the source of growth. Growth required capital accumulation, and it was the accumulations made possible by concentrating incomes that justified an unequal class structure. This system worked well-so long as growth did occur and the working classes enjoyed the benefit of a steadily rising living standard. But the First World War sounded the death-knell of this model. Further, until the postwar years, the world economy witnessed not only the scourge of two world wars but also its collapse during the Great Depression of 1929-33. The creation of Bretton Woods ‘ twins’ i.e., IMF and World Bank in 1944 set the stage for steady progress, stability and development in the industrial and developing countries till early 1970s. This period is often described as the ‘golden age of the world economy’ in terms of expansion of international trade and economic growth. However, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, characterised by fixed but adjustable exchange rates and international supervision of capital flows, ended a period of stable growth. Of course, there followed a short period of oil and commodity boom, with declining inequality fuelled by commercial debt. Global inequality thus fell in the late 1970s. Poor countries had the benefit of low interest rates and easy credit and high commodity prices, especially for oil. But in 1980-81 the phase of low interest rates and high commodity prices 9  ended. Since 1982 there was a beginning of unprecedented debt crisis in developing countries in the wake of high interest rates and low commodity prices, forcing severe cutbacks in the imports of developing countries. During 1980s there was resurgence of neo-liberal ideology with set back to the idea of national sovereignty and end of Keynesian policies. This led to an extraordinary systematic increase in inequality between rich and poor nations. However inequality in the decade of debt (1980s) also followed the period of rising inequality in the age of globalisation (1990s). The only significant region of declining inequality was Southeast Asia (till 1997); the direction changed however subsequently. 23.2 NATURE AND PATTERN OF INEQUALITY 23.2.1 Some Evidence on Inequality A study of 77 countries with 82 per cent of the world’s people shows that between 1950s and 1990s inequality rose in almost 45 countries and fell in 16. Many of these countries with rising inequality are those in Eastern Europe and the CIS that suffered negative or low growth in the 1990s. Latin America and Caribbean countries have among the world’s highest income inequality. In 13 of the 20 countries with data for the 1990s, the poorest 10 per cent had less than 1/20 of the income of the richest 10 per cent. This high income inequality places millions in extreme poverty and severely limits the effects of equally shared growth. Countries in East Asia and the Pacific exhibit no clear pattern, varying from the fairly equal Korea and Vietnam to the much equal Malaysia and the Philippines. In China, inequality has followed a U- shaped pattern, with inequality falling until the mid-1980s and rising since then. In India, inequality first fell and now has come to a halt. In 16 of the 22 Sub-Saharan countries in 1990s, the poorest 10 per cent of the population had less than 1/10 of income of the richest 10 per cent, and in 9 less than 1/20. Among OECD countries there is also diversity in income inequality, from the low levels in Austria and Denmark to the relatively high levels in the United Kingdom and the USA. These countries seem to have experienced a U-shaped change in inequality with declines in the 1970s, changing to increases in the 1980s and 1990s. Another study compares the richest and the poorest people across the globe, providing a much more complete picture of world inequality than a simple comparison of country averages would. Some of the results of the study are notable: a) world inequality is very high. In 1993, the poorest 10 per cent of the world’s people had only 1.6 per cent of the income of the richest 10 per cent; b) the richest 1 per cent of the population received as much income as the poorest 57 per cent in 1993; c) the richest 10 per cent of the US population had a combined income greater than that of poorest 43 per cent of the world’s people; d) around 25 per cent of the world’s people received 75 per cent of the world’s income. Further, according to UNDP’s 1996 Human Development Report, in 1993 only US$ 5 trillion of the US$ 23 trillion global GDP was from the developing countries though they accounted for more than 80 per cent of total world population. A number of studies estimate that the ratio of the incomes of the richest to the poorest countries increased at least six-fold between 1970 and 1985 and the average income gap between the richest and the poorest countries grew almost nine-fold i.e. from $1500 to $ 12000 during this period. Efforts to reduce inequality through donors’ aid to poorer countries could not solve the problem, since aid flows from rich to poor countries dropped more than 20 per cent during 1990s. 10 Another indicator of inequality is the spending on R&D in rich and poor countries. Nearly 85 per cent of total world spending on R&D occurs in OECD. USA and Japan each represent 2.5 per cent of their GDP spending on R&D as against 0.5 per cent in case of developing countries. Evidently, the world economy has witnessed increasing inequality and polarisation in the distribution of wealth. The above findings also show that the benefits of global economic growth have disproportionately gone to the previously wealthy nations and have led to accentuating the level of inequality. 23.2.2 Defining Inequality and Poverty Inequality is not the same as poverty. Whereas the poverty is concerned with the absolute standard of living of a part of society i.e. the poor-inequality refers to relative living standard across the whole society. At maximum inequality, one person has everything and clearly, poverty is high. But minimum inequality (where all are equal) is possible with zero poverty (where no one is poor) as well as with maximum poverty (where all are poor). Poverty is thus the inability to attain a minimum standard of living. But inequality is possible both in the case of poor and non-poor with different magnitudes. Inequality is, therefore, a stark and undeniable feature of present day world economic and political order. 23.2.3 Approaches to Measuring Inequality Two major approaches to measuring inequality are i) currency rate conversions in assessing global income inequality and ii) purchasing power parity (PPP) conversion rates used to convert incomes into a common currency in which differences in national price levels are eliminated. Both approaches to measuring inequality produce different results. Using exchange rates not only produce much higher measure of inequality, but also affect trends in inequality. Based on country averages, income inequality between the world’s richest and poorest in 1970 and 1997 was as follows: with the exchange rate measure, the ratio of the income of the richest 20 per cent to that of the poorest 20 per cent grew from 34 to 1 in 1970 to 70 to 1 in 1997.With the PPP measure, the ratio fell from 15 to 1 to 13 to 1 during the same period. Although both measures show increasing inequality between the richest and the poorest, the exchange rate measure shows much larger increase than the rise in real living standards (shown by purchasing power parity measure). Income levels across countries have been both diverging and converging- with some regions closing the income gap and others drifting away. In 1960 there was a bunching of regions, with East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa having an average per capita income around 1/9 to 1/10 of that in high income OECD countries. Latin America fared somewhat better but still had just 1/3 to ½ of the per capita income of those OECD countries. By 1990s however, Asia Pacific per capita income rose to 1/5; in South Asia after worsening in the 1960s and 1970s remains about 1/10 of that in OECD. In Sub-Saharan Africa, per capita income deteriorated to 1/18 by 1998 as against 1/9 in 1960. 23.2.4 Inequality and Development: Differing Views Writing on development theory, Simon Kuznets’ famous hypothesis linked equality to the development process. Kuznets argued that as industrialisation began, it might lead to an increasing inequality at first; but as industrialisation deepens, the centre of economic activities would shift to cities. And the growing share of wage-earning class would have access to purchasing power to demand consumption goods and thus tending to move in the direction of more money 11  incomes. However Kuznets hypothesis has recently come under attack. With trade union movements in disorder and welfare states in disrepute, the Kuznets hypothesis is dismissed as non-conforming by recent data suggesting that there is no contradiction between inequality and development. The ‘East Asian Miracle’ (EAM) hypothesis that development and rising equality normally occur together also vindicated the results of the Kuznets hypothesis and it has been argued that despite many efforts to measure inequality at the national level, nothing much has happened to bring these measurements together in a single global data set. However, a study undertaken by Klaus Deigning and Lyn Squire of the World Bank on income inequality shows no consistent pattern emerging among the much sought-after systematic relationship between inequality, income and growth. Some analysts seem to confirm the Kuznets hypothesis. Others argued instead that inequality first falls and then rises with rising income: the opposite pattern. The EAM findings of a relationship between low income inequality and later growth was supported, and then questioned, on the ground that the relationship seemed to rest on continent-specific differences between Latin America and Asia. Technical development raises the relative productivity of the well trained, therefore, pay the skilled more and the unskilled less. In these cases, inequalities expressed as clusters of privileged opportunity will foster more rapid growth. Economists have broached four different possibilities each with different implications for the strategy of economic development. The redistributionist view holds that egalitarian social policies are a pre-condition for growth and points to the Asian miracle as evidence. This view emphasises land reform and education, but tends to resist intervention in market processes once preconditions have been successfully met. Neo-liberal view is that policymakers should go for growth, concentrating resources on comparative advantage, exports, and the fostering of technological change. Inequality may well rise, but the success of a growth strategy makes the sacrifice worthwhile. The Kuznets and Keynes view implies that increasing equality is the normal outcome of a process of rising incomes-whether fast or slow-and that social welfare policies are normal outgrowths of the transition to an urban industrial economy. This perspective does not presuppose that redistribution should precede growth; it only implies that inequality will decline as the development process matures. The Scotch verdict is that development process may be unrelated to social and economic inequalities in any systematic way; this is the fallback position of some who argue for growth as the sole development objective. 23.3 INEQUALITY: MAJOR CAUSES 23.3.1 Uneven International Economic System Historically, factors explaining inequality among nations have been neo-colonial patterns of centre-periphery dependence shown by adverse terms of trade of developing countries vis-á- vis developed countries. In 1949, Raul Prebisch, the Argentine economist revealed in his study that during 1870-1914, the developing countries of Latin America suffered terms of trade losses against the industrial countries and hence there was lot of divergence between the level of incomes of Centre and Periphery members. 12 More recently, during the 1980s for example, prices of many primary commodities fell to their lowest levels since Second World War. Non-oil commodity prices declined for most of the decade, although they recovered a little in 1988. By 1989, average commodity prices were still 33 per cent lower than in 1980. Oil prices also fell steadily between 1980 and 1986. The decline in terms of trade during the 1980s has been most pronounced in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The fall in prices during the 1980s cost Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa 13 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively of their exports’ real import purchasing power relative to the 1970s. The world economy turned a new leaf when in 1982, negative real interest rates turned positive which led to an increasingly noticeable division between the Haves with capital assets and the Have-nots depending only on income from work and the job markets. 23.3.2 Power Game in International Politics The power game in international politics has co-opted certain countries and aligned them with the rich countries while majority of the developing countries are marginalised. The Bretton Woods twins established (IMF and World Bank) in 1944 moved in a unilateral way in imposing their adjustment programmes on debt-ridden countries in the early 1980s. The ‘Washington Consensus’ further strengthened the forces of market-friendly policies in case of raising funding from IMF-World Bank. Although in United Nations Organisations, there is an overwhelming majority of developing countries, the decision-making power still vests with a select group of developed countries. In seeking loan from IMF-World Bank, USA exercises the veto power, owing to its major quota holding in these institutions. The functioning of the WTO is another example where the will of the ‘richmen’s club’ reigns supreme to promote and facilitate the expansion of world trade. Market access for the commodities of developing world still suffers from a variety of NTBs imposed by the developed world. Massive subsidies provided by European governments to their farmers block the exports of agriculture commodities from the developing world. All these factors accentuate inequality among the rich industrial countries and the poor developing countries. 23.3.3 Emerging Labour Markets and Skill Differentials In the 1990s, two disturbing tendencies in the labour market were noticed which added pressure in the direction of greater inequality. The first is the growing disparity between the wages of highly skilled workers and those who have lower levels of skills. The second tendency is the low level of generation of formal employment and the consequent deterioration in the quality of jobs. Almost 8 out of 10 jobs created in the 1990s correspond to low-quality jobs in the informal sector. The sudden resurgence of inequality is also manifested in the post-industrial revolution that is currently taking place. Four categories of income earners emerge in these scenario-symbolic analysts i.e. the producer/generator of ideas; workers in the services sector; workers linked with the welfare state, and workers in routine production jobs exposed to the dangers of factory relocations or sectoral restructuring. While the first three categories of workers enjoy certain in-built immunity system from the vagaries of markets, the last category suffers the most in terms of unemployment or shrinkage of wage rate. For example, the advent of information technology and the opening of world markets have created an economic order, which is founded on the production/generation of ideas. Consequently, it manifests greater inequality than 13  manufacturing products at the lowest possible cost. Unskilled workers are the first victims and pay high price for this transformation. The growing inequality in wages as a function of levels of skill does not seem to be confined to a particular region. Indeed a recent report by UNCTAD (1997) indicates that this may be an almost universal pattern, since it has also affected a number of industrial countries and some rapidly growing economies in the Asia Pacific region and has particularly given rise to pressure on the middle class in many countries. 23.4 INEQUALITY: EFFECTS AND CONSEQUENCES a) Reverse Flow of Resources: The debt crisis of early 1980s had deleterious effects with reverse flow of resources from poor to rich nations and savage cutbacks in the volume of imports of the debt-ridden countries. This has been one of the major effects of the process of integration carried out in the 1980 under circumstances of unsustainable finance in which wealth has flowed upwards from the poor countries to the rich, and mainly to the upper financial strata of the richest countries. b) Pitfalls of Concentration of Wealth: Inequality can exacerbate the effects of market and policy failures on growth and thus on progress against poverty. Inequality turns out to be a special problem in poor countries where imperfect markets and institutional failures are common. In case of weak capital markets poor people lacking good collaterals are unable to borrow, limiting their start-up of small businesses and reducing overall growth and limiting opportunities for poor people. Although growth is not always sufficient to advance human development and reduce income poverty, the experiences of several Asia Pacific countries suggest that it makes a big contribution. Concentration of income at the top can undermine the kinds of public policies such as support for high quality universal public education. Developing and implementing good social policies are especially difficult where inequality takes the form of concentration at the top combined with substantial poverty at the bottom. c) Damaging the Social Fabric: The forces of globalisation have, further, led to an increase in inequality not only amongst the nations but also within countries during 1990s. The advent of the market economy has also spilled over to form a separate market society that has had a destructive effect on the social fabric of the nations embedded in the globalisation process. Inequality, therefore, erodes social capital, including the sense of the trust and citizen responsibility that are key to the formation and sustainability of sound public institutions. Differences in income inequality across countries are closely associated with differences in rates of crime and violence. 23.5 STRATEGY TO REDUCE INEQUALITY Neo-colonial patterns of centre-periphery dependence and crushing debt burden left the developing countries to fend themselves off. There has hardly been any assumption of responsibility by the rich countries for this state of affairs of the poor countries. Not only this, the rich countries have done away with the pretence of attempting to foster development in the world at large, but also have preferred to substitute the rhetoric of ungoverned markets to take automatic care of developmental issues. 14 Following the debate between Rawlsian and Utilitarian Schools of Thought, while the former emphasises that society’s sole economic goal should be to improve the position of the least disadvantaged and limiting the inequality can benefit the poor; the latter School opines that accelerated growth can take care of the disadvantaged group in the society. By limiting inequality, the society’s consumption may fall. However given the centrality of redistribution in modern politics, most rich societies are still divided on this issue. In the struggle against inequality under the presence of globalisation, the poor countries are advised to implement pro-poor growth policies, improve poverty and social impact analysis and amongst multilateral and bilateral development agencies, efforts need to be carried out in the direction of aligning their programmes with country-specific strategy. The UN Millennium Declaration has a target till 2015 to bringdown the proportion of the world’s people living on less than $1 a day. Second, with regard to the functioning of the labour markets particularly in the developing countries, perhaps the single change that would do most to reduce global inequality over the medium term would be closing of the “knowledge gap”, giving people in developing countries access to new technology and quality education. 23.6 SUMMARY Inequality among nations, in the economic sense, shows disparate and uneven standards of living enjoyed by the people of different nations. Although inequality has persisted since time immemorial among nations and was not as much acute and magnified in 19th Century as it has been witnessed at the end of 20th Century. Inequality and poverty, though different in letter and spirit, reinforce each other. Inequality, according to the neo-liberal view, should not be despicable as it leads to higher rate of capital accumulation and growth in the country. Redistributionists take a contrary view as the experience of East Asia has shown that equality and development co-exit. Inequality has several adverse effects leading to the successive periods of economic crisis in developing countries, concentration of wealth and finally damaging the social fabric. Rawlsian prescription to reduce inequality is to emphasise society’s sole economic goal to improve the position of the least disadvantaged. The opposite camp of neo-liberals is highly obsessed with growth, which can automatically take care of the disadvantaged group. The industrially developed world eulogises the virtues of free market ideology and the poor developing world is advised to implement pro-poor growth policies and at the same time remove the ‘knowledge gap’ to participate in the evolving world economic order. Whatever inequalities remain, they are themselves to be blamed and should rectify the existing imbalances and disparities in their countries. 23.7 EXERCISES 1. Trace briefly the evolution of the concept of inequality. 2. Show some major indicators of inequality at the global level. 3. Distinguish between inequality and poverty. 15  4. What are the two approaches to measuring inequality? 5. List the different views on inequality and development. 6. Identify major causes of inequality. 7. List any four of the effects of inequality. 8. Distinguish between Rawlsian and Utilitarian Schools of Thought. 9. Give two strategic planks to reduce inequality among nations. 16