1% da população mundial detém 50% do PIB do planeta - Oxfam

 Pronto: idiotas ingênuos vão denunciar o escândalo e pedir o fim das desiguladades. Idiotas espertos vão aproveitar a deixa para avançar sobre a fortuna dos superricos, supostamente para fins de distribuição, mas cobrando um pedágio no meio do caminho. Ambos, idiotas menores e maiores conseguirão assustar os ricos, levá-los para a elisão fiscal e a clandestinidade, e com isso vão reduzir o potencial de criação de riqueza no mundo, tornando a todos mais pobres...
A Oxfam é uma entidade benemérita criada durante a segunda guerra na Inglaterra para cuidar da fome: Oxfor Famine Relief. Rapidamente se tornou uma entidade progressista, participando de todos os equívocos dos fabianos e dos socialistas europeus em geral, contribuindo, involuntariamente, para manter o mundo, especialmente a África, na pobreza.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

1% da população mundial detém 50% do PIB do planeta

Jamil Chade, correspondente na Suíça - O Estado de S. Paulo

19 Janeiro 2015 | 07h 15

Elite já acumula riqueza equivalente a tudo o que os demais 99% das pessoas detêm

GENEBRA - A riqueza acumulada por 1% da população mundial será superior a tudo o que os demais possuem. Os dados foram apresentados nesta segunda-feira, 19, pela entidade Oxfam, às vésperas do Fórum Econômico Mundial de Davos e que justamente reúne a cúpula do planeta.
Segundo a entidade, a fortuna de 99% da população mundial será equivalente a tudo o que acumula apenas a nata da sociedade, cerca de 1% do mundo.
Para a entidade, a crise econômica mundial que começou em 2008 resultou em uma "explosão da desigualdade". Hoje, uma a cada nove pessoas ainda passa fome no planeta que produz alimentos para três planetas e mais de 1 bilhão de pessoas ganham menos de US$ 1,25 por dia.
O que chama a atenção da entidade, porém, é que a concentração de riqueza é cada vez maior. Em 2009, a parcela de 1% mais rica da população mundial acumulava 44% do PIB do planeta. Em 2014, essa taxa chegou a 48% e, em 2016, ela atingirá 50%.

Em média, cada pessoa dessa elite do planeta mantém uma renda de US$ 2,7 milhões. Dos demais 52% do PIB global, quase tudo está nas mãos da camada dos 20% mais ricos.
O restante da população do mundo - cerca de 80% - precisa dividir 5,5% da riqueza do planeta e acumula uma renda de apenas US$ 3,8 mil. O valor é 700 vezes menor que a renda da elite.
Winnie Byanyima, diretora-executiva da Oxfam, espera usar o encontro de Davos para insistir que a desigualdade social precisa ser alvo dos governos e de líderes do setor privado, alertando para os riscos que essa situação cria na política internacional.
Entre as medidas defendidas por ela está um maior rigor fiscal contra multinacionais e mesmo um acordo para o clima. "Queremos mesmo viver em um mundo onde 1% detém mais que todos nós juntos?"questionou. "A escala da desigualdade global é assustadora e, apesar do tema estar na agenda política, a diferença entre pobres e ricos apenas aumenta", atacou.
Segundo ela, líderes como Barack Obama e a gerente do Fundo Monetário Internacional, Christine Lagarde, de fato estão falando cada vez mais sobre o assunto. Mas a Oxfam alerta que pouco tem sido feito além de discursos.

De volta a reducao da pobreza na América Latina - Washington Post

Um editorial do Washington Post que foca na melhoria das condições sociais na América Latina. Independentemente desses progressos, não custa lembrar que a América Latina continua sendo a região mais desigual do planeta, e que essa desigualdade tem a ver basicamente com a educação (ou falta de).
Aparentemente, se depender disso, vai demorar ainda um bocado para a região melhorar de verdade.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

The Latin upbeat

Editorial Washington Post, December 24, 2011

WE INTERRUPT the current gloom about the global economy to bring you a word about progress. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the portion of the population living in poverty fell substantially from 1990 to 2010, from 48.4 percent to 31.4 percent, according to a new United Nations report. And this occurred as the population grew from 440.7 million to 582 million.
The news about the rate of extreme poverty is even better: it fell from 22.6 percent in 1990 to 12.3 percent last year. This means that Latin America has almost met the goal, set by the United Nations in 2000, of reducing extreme poverty to half the 1990 rate by 2015. And there’s more: Latin America’s notoriously unequal income distribution is becoming less so. The U.N. report, prepared by its Economic Commission for Latin America in Santiago, Chile, suggests that the Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of inequality, steadily declined in 10 Latin countries over the past decade.
What went right? Latin America endured a “lost decade” of slow growth during the 1980s, as a consequence of which both poverty and inequality rose. That long bust resulted from a previous spate of artificial debt-fueled growth. But the structural reforms that countries enacted as the price of debt relief have, over time, paid off in the form of more durable, broader-based prosperity. Freer trade among Latin countries, and between Latin America and the United States, helped, too.
The region’s governments increased spending on health, education and social benefits — and targeted those resources more efficiently to the neediest. Across the region, better education and health care for women, coupled with more freedom and democracy (except in Cuba, Venezuela and their clients), contributed to declining fertility rates. This enabled women to earn more, and families to devote more time and resources to each of their children.
The results have been most dramatic in the largest Latin American nation, Brazil, which is now so prosperous that it is being looked to for help in bailing out Europe. Between 2003 and 2009, the share of Brazil’s population living on $2 per day or less fell from 22 percent to 7 percent, according to the World Bank, whose loans supported Brazil’s anti-poverty programs. But the second-largest country, Mexico, also has bounced back from a sharp recession in 2009; Wells Fargo Securities Economic Group forecasts that Mexico’s economy will grow 4.3 percent in 2012 — double the predicted U.S. rate. Inequality has eased there as well.Notably, Mexico, like another U.S. friend, Colombia, kept its economy moving despite struggling against drug-related violence.
Obviously all is not perfect in Latin America. Cuba still stagnates, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez is burdened by crime and inflation. Millions of Latin Americans engaged in farming and informal urban employment have yet to share in the benefits of growth. Some Latin countries remain dependent on commodity prices; China’s raw-material shopping spree has buoyed them, but probably can’t last forever.
But the basic trends are positive — much more so than many would have predicted based on the region’s predicament at the end of the 1980s. Latin America is reaping the fruits of reform, openness and hard work. There’s a lesson in that for the whole world.

Desigualdade nos Estados Unidos - The Economist, Joseph Stiglitz (Vanity Fair)

Três artigos sobre a desigualdade na sociedade americana:

INEQUALITY
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
Vanity Fair, May 2011
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105?currentPage=all

American politics
Democracy in America
Inequality: The 1% solution
The Economist, Apr 15th 2011, 15:03 by M.S.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/inequality&fsrc=nwl

Inequality and politics
Stiglitz and the progressive Ouroboros
The Economist, Apr 11th 2011, 21:30 by W.W.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/inequality_and_politics


Leiam todos os três, na sequência inversa, neste post do meu blog Textos PRA:

Desigualdade nos Estados Unidos - The Economist, Joseph Stiglitz (Vanity Fair)
Artigos sobre a desigualdade na sociedade americana
Sábado, Abril 16, 2011
http://textospra.blogspot.com/2011/04/desigualdade-nos-estados-unidos.html

A globalizacao e as desigualdades: corrigindo velhos mitos

Estou revisando alguns dos meus escritos para um livro sobre a globalização e a antiglobalização, e fui naturalmente levado a verificar alguns links a matérias de imprensa, especificamente vinculadas a estudos do economista catalão da Columbia University, Xavier Sala-i-Martin, citado nas duas matérias do New York Times que transcrevo abaixo.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Economic Scene; The rich get rich and poor get poorer. Right? Let's take another look.
By Virginia Postrel
The New York Times, August 15, 2002

TO critics of economic liberalization and international trade, it is an article of faith that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.
''Inequality is soaring through the globalization period -- within countries and across countries,'' Noam Chomsky told a conference last fall, summarizing this common view.
Antiglobalization activists are not just making up this idea. They have taken it from seemingly authoritative sources, notably the 1999 United Nations Human Development Report.
That widely cited report stated: ''Gaps in income between the poorest and richest countries have continued to widen. In 1960 the 20 percent of the world's people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20 percent -- in 1997, 74 times as much.'' It added that ''gaps are widening both between and within countries.''
Fortunately, this scary portrait is highly misleading.
''When I started looking at the numbers, I saw a lot of mistakes,'' says Xavier Sala-i-Martin, an economist at Columbia. Some were departures from standard economic procedures, like not correcting for price levels from country to country.
''Some agencies didn't adjust for the fact that Ethiopia is cheaper than the U.S.,'' he said. ''Some of them were hiding numbers that we know exist.'' For instance, the report included data from only 19 of the 29 industrialized countries then in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But the biggest problem was not so technical. It was hidden in plain sight. The United Nations report and others looked at gaps in income of the richest and poorest countries -- not rich and poor individuals.
That means the formerly poor citizens of giant countries could become a lot richer and still barely show up in the data.
''Treating countries like China and Grenada as two data points with equal weight does not seem reasonable because there are about 12,000 Chinese citizens for each person living in Grenada,'' writes Professor Sala-i-Martin in ''The World Distribution of Income (Estimated from Individual Country Distributions).'' That is one of two related working papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research. (The papers are available on Professor Sala-i-Martin's Web site at www.columbia.edu/xs23/home.html.)
Counting by countries misses the biggest economic advance in history, completely distorting the record of the globalization period.
Over the last three decades, and especially since the 1980's, the world's two largest countries, China and India, have raced ahead economically. So have other Asian countries with relatively large populations.
The result is that 2.5 billion people have seen their standards of living rise toward those of the billion people in the already developed countries -- decreasing global poverty and increasing global equality. From the point of view of individuals, economic liberalization has been a huge success.
''You have to look at people,'' says Professor Sala-i-Martin. ''Because if you look at countries, we do have lots and lots of little countries that are doing very poorly, namely Africa -- 35 African countries.'' But all Africa has only about half as many people as China.
In his paper, ''The Disturbing 'Rise' of Global Income Inequality,'' he estimates the worldwide distribution of income by individuals rather than countries. The results are striking.
In 1970, global income distribution peaked at about $1,000 in today's dollars, a common measure of poverty ($2 a day in 1985 dollars). In 1998, by contrast, the largest number of people earned about $8,000 -- a standard of living equivalent to Portugal's.
''That's what I call a new world middle class,'' says Professor Sala-i-Martin. It is mostly made up of the top 40 percent of Chinese and Indians, and the effect of their economic rise is big.
What about the argument that income gaps are widening within these rapidly advancing countries? With a few exceptions, it is true, but still misleading.
The rich did get richer faster than the poor did. But for the most part the poor did not get poorer. They got richer, too. In exchange for significantly rising living standards, a little more internal inequality is not such a bad thing.
''One would like to think that it is unambiguously good that more than a third of the poorest citizens see their incomes grow and converge to the levels enjoyed by the richest people in the world,'' writes Professor Sala-i-Martin. ''And if our indexes say that inequality rises, then rising inequality must be good, and we should not worry about it!''
There is, however, one large country where the poor really are getting poorer while the rich grow richer: Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.
Nigeria's economy has actually shrunk over the last three decades, and the absolute poverty rate -- the percentage of the population living on less than $1 a day in 1985 dollars -- skyrocketed to 46 percent in 1998 from 9 percent in 1970.
While most Nigerians were falling further into destitution, the political and economic elite grew richer. The problem is not too much liberalization but too little, a politicized economy with widespread corruption.
''The rich guys are doing well, therefore reforms will not come,'' says a pessimistic Professor Sala-i-Martin. He has begun studying Nigeria, trying to come up with ways around the political problem.
That country is typical of Africa, which is growing ever poorer. Fully 95 percent of the world's ''one-dollar poor'' live in Africa, and in many countries they make up the vast majority of the population. That poverty, not the rising wealth of Asian countries, is the global economy's real problem.
''The welfare implications of finding how to turn around the growth performance of Africa are so staggering,'' he writes, ''that this has probably become the most important question in economics.''
Photo: While Nigeria is one country where the poor are getting poorer while the rich grow richer, data suggesting this is the case in much of the world may be misleading. (Associated Press)

Virginia Postrel is the author of ''The Future and Its Enemies'' and is writing a book on the increasing importance of aesthetics in the economy and society. E-mail: vpostrel@dynamist.com.

====================

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Good News About Poverty
By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times, November 27, 2004

I hate to be the bearer of good news, because only pessimists are regarded as intellectually serious, but we're in the 11th month of the most prosperous year in human history. Last week, the World Bank released a report showing that global growth "accelerated sharply" this year to a rate of about 4 percent.

Best of all, the poorer nations are leading the way. Some rich countries, like the U.S. and Japan, are doing well, but the developing world is leading this economic surge. Developing countries are seeing their economies expand by 6.1 percent this year - an unprecedented rate - and, even if you take China, India and Russia out of the equation, developing world growth is still around 5 percent. As even the cautious folks at the World Bank note, all developing regions are growing faster this decade than they did in the 1980's and 90's.

This is having a wonderful effect on world poverty, because when regions grow, that growth is shared up and down the income ladder. In its report, the World Bank notes that economic growth is producing a "spectacular" decline in poverty in East and South Asia. In 1990, there were roughly 472 million people in the East Asia and Pacific region living on less than $1 a day. By 2001, there were 271 million living in extreme poverty, and by 2015, at current projections, there will only be 19 million people living under those conditions.

Less dramatic declines in extreme poverty have been noted around the developing world, with the vital exception of sub-Saharan Africa. It now seems quite possible that we will meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which were set a few years ago: the number of people living in extreme poverty will be cut in half by the year 2015. As Martin Wolf of The Financial Times wrote in his recent book, "Why Globalization Works": "Never before have so many people - or so large a proportion of the world's population - enjoyed such large rises in their standard of living."

As other research confirms, these rapid improvements at the bottom of the income ladder are contributing to and correlating with declines in illiteracy, child labor rates and fertility rates. The growth in the world's poorer regions also supports the argument that we are seeing a drop in global inequality.

Economists have been arguing furiously about whether inequality is increasing or decreasing. But it now seems likely that while inequality has grown within particular nations, it is shrinking among individuals worldwide. The Catalan economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin looked at eight measures of global inequality and found they told the same story: after remaining constant during the 70's, inequality among individuals has since declined.

What explains all this good news? The short answer is this thing we call globalization. Over the past decades, many nations have undertaken structural reforms to lower trade barriers, shore up property rights and free economic activity. International trade is surging. The poor nations that opened themselves up to trade, investment and those evil multinational corporations saw the sharpest poverty declines. Write this on your forehead: Free trade reduces world suffering.

Of course, all the news is not good. Plagued by bad governments and AIDS, sub-Saharan Africa has not joined in the benefits of globalization. Big budget deficits in the U.S. and elsewhere threaten stable growth. High oil prices are a problem. Trade produces losers as well as winners, especially among less-skilled workers in the developed world.

But especially around Thanksgiving, it's worth appreciating some of the things that have gone right, and not just sweeping reports like the one from the World Bank under the rug.

It's worth reminding ourselves that the key task ahead is spreading the benefits of globalization to Africa and the Middle East. It's worth noting this perhaps not too surprising phenomenon: As free trade improves the lives of people in poor countries, it is viewed with suspicion by more people in rich countries.

Just once, I'd like to see someone like Bono or Bruce Springsteen stand up at a concert and speak the truth to his fan base: that the world is complicated and there are no free lunches. But if you really want to reduce world poverty, you should be cheering on those guys in pinstripe suits at the free-trade negotiations and those investors jetting around the world. Thanks, in part, to them, we are making progress against poverty. Thanks, in part, to them, more people around the world have something to be thankful for.