Global
inequalities in wealth are at their highest level for 20 years and are growing,
according to a new report by Save The Children. While the charity acknowledges
progress has been made in goals such as reducing child mortality, the report
says this has been uneven across income groups. Continuing inequality could
hinder further progress in improving living standards, the charity says.
The
report comes ahead of a meeting of a high-level UN panel on poverty. "In
recent decades the world has made dramatic progress in cutting child deaths and
improving opportunities for children; we are now reaching a tipping point where
preventable child deaths could be eradicated in our lifetime," Save the
Children's chief executive, Justin Forsyth, said. "Unless inequality is
addressed... any future development framework will simply not succeed in
maintaining or accelerating progress. What's more, it will hold individual
countries - and the world - back from experiencing real growth and
prosperity," Mr Forsyth added.
Save
The Children's researchers found that in most of the 32 developing countries
they looked at, the rich had increased their share of national income since the
1990s. In a fifth of the countries, the incomes of the poorest had fallen over
the same period. The gap has become particularly pronounced among children and
affects their well-being as well as causing disparities in several key
indicators, the charity says. For example, it notes that in Tanzania, child
mortality in the richest fifth of the population fell from 135 to 90 per 1,000
births over the research period, while the poorest fifth saw hardly any
progress with a modest fall of 140 to 137 per 1,000 births.
Source: BBC News
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