Chapter Summary for Chapter 13
Globally, there are now many more billionaires than there were just 30 years ago. There are also many millions of people earning far less than what people in the developed world consider a minimum wage. Some very similar social processes that bring about inequality within nations also operate at the global level across nations and this chapter explores inequality on a global scale.
Global economic inequality is defined as the systematic inequalities that exist between countries, allowing for the simultaneous existence of inequalities within countries.
There are many measures of a country’s wealth, including Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Income (GNI). The measures used to gauge national wealth heavily influence the conclusions we reach on inequalities. The World Bank uses a typology of high-income, middle-income and low-income countries.
The whole debate about inequality is an ongoing one: there are those who see globalization as ‘the great leveller’, while others see globalization as exacerbating existing patterns of inequality. Huge disparities still persist in terms of health, hunger and education.
The newly industrializing countries (NICs) have achieved much economic success over recent years. Reasons for this include: the positive aspects of the colonial legacy; world economic growth between 1950s and 1970s; American aid during the Cold War; the values of post-Confucianism; strongly interventionist policies on the part of indigenous governments.
Market-oriented theories of development favour the pursuit of unfettered capitalism, a perspective exemplified by Rostow’s argument that underdeveloped societies need to embrace a market approach. The most famous version of modernization theory is Rostow’s ‘stages of economic growth’ model: traditional stage, ‘take-off’, technological maturity and high mass consumption.
From the 1960s this perspective was challenged, first by Marxist dependency theory with its emphasis on the effects of colonialism and later by Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. The world-systems model sees core, semi-peripheral and peripheral countries, though these categories are not fixed and individual countries can move from one to another.
State-centred theories of development argue that nations are not simply at the mercy of transnational forces and global markets, but the intervention of nation-states can shape and even generate positive economic development. East Asian economies are held as an example of state-led development.
The scientific study of human populations is called demography. The world population passed six billion in late 1999. The near zero or negative growth rates of the advanced nations contrast with the high net rates and distorted population pyramids of many of the less developed societies.
Malthus famously pointed out the unequal relationship between population growth and food production, forecasting large-scale hunger and famine in the future. Although there have been famines and undernourishment remains a serious issue in the developing countries, his doom-laden forecast has not materialized. However, by the late twentieth century it seemed that Malthus’s ideas, in modified form, might again have relevance as the global population continues to rise.
The demographic transition consists of three stages, from high birth-high death regimes to low birth-low death regimes and characterizes many developed societies. A possible fourth stage – the post-industrial stage – is also theorized.
The world’s population is forecast to be anything between 11.8 and 25 billion people by 2150, raising much concern about planet Earth’s capacity to sustain such historically high levels of human population.
