Bridging the Divide

ARTICLE BY,

VINOTHKUMAR.V

Bridging the Divide

As per the recent report, the rich and the poor gap widens, that is a two percent of richest controlling over the half of the population all over the world. Also one of the studies reveals that wealthiest one percent of world’s adults having nearly 40 percent of total assets. Look out the following table.

Region	% of world’s wealth
USA	30
Europe	30
Pacific-Asian (Australia, Japan etc)	30
Rest ( India, China, Latin America and. Africa)	10

According to the World Bank, 1.1 billion of the world's 6.5-billion people live on less than a dollar a day.  People in developed countries earn an annual per capita income of more than $17,000 in average.

Average household wealth in the United States was $144,000 per person in 2000, compared to per capita assets of about $1,100 in India and $1,400 in Indonesia.

Why this disparity in wealth?

There are several reasons behind this disparity in wealth, the experts say that the most widely acceptable reasons are cultural, political and productivity level of the countries. If productivity increases, per capita income increases which yields more wealth but it depends on savings. In USA, they have financial markets and housing markets to protect their money since they are earning more. But in most of the other countries, families need all their income to meet their basic needs itself, then how can they save?

Bridging the Gap

It is not an easy task to narrow the disparity between the rich and the poor. We can say, Globalization is one of the ways to narrow the gap, but it is also a tedious process. The World Bank predicts that globalization will lift many more of the globe's poorest people out of poverty during the next 25 years.

But many of the poor countries which need decades to become the state of a developing country status even though they are provided with financial and industrial assistance since their cultural and political levels are different. As we know that rich countries are rich since they are industrialized for centuries. So, it is not possible to make a poor country a rich within a few decades.

But we have to narrow the gap in any way, so that World Bank and United Nations have taken several initiatives by giving financial assistance to start small businesses, to send their wards to school and to healthcare. It is not only some organizations’ job, it is left to the individuals.

Let us pledge to remove the gap within the country first and then the countries.

Spend less and help more!

Reference:

Reports from World Bank and Center for Global development