Thursday, November 01, 2012

Only Socialism Will Save the Children

In the latest Save The Children's report 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.

5% of the world’s population controls over 37% of global income, while the bottom 5% have less than 0.2%. Meanwhile, the income of the richest 1.75% of the world’s population matches the income of the poorest 77%.

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.

In their 32 sample countries, children in the richest 10% have access to 35 times the income that is available to children in the poorest 10%. For the general population in our sample countries, the richest 10% of people has access to 17 times the incomes of the poorest. This means that, for children, the gap in access to resources is double that of the total population. Some children are born into families with access to 50, 100, or even 200 times the resources available to the poorest children. In Bolivia the richest children live in households that have incomes a staggering 222 times those of the poorest), Colombia (161 times), Haiti (142 times), Guatemala (142 times), Namibia (72 times) and Peru (66 times).

These children have better healthcare, more nutritious food and better access to school, and are less likely to have to start work at an early age. in Nigeria the poorest children are more than twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday as the richest children. While children in the highest
wealth 20% suffer 87 deaths per 1,000 live births, for those in the lowest 20% the figure is 219 deaths per 1,000 live births.

In Madagascar – which saw a massive decrease in under-five mortality between the late 90s and mid-2000s – we found that the gains made in
reducing child mortality had been disproportionately concentrated in the top wealth quintile. While child mortality in the richest fifth fell from 142 to
49 per 1,000 live births, the poorest fifth saw less progress, with a more modest fall from 195 to 101 per 1,000 live births. 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.

But disparities in health outcomes do not only exist in poorer countries. In Canada, one of the world’s eight richest countries, low-income children are 2.5 times more likely to have a problem with vision, hearing,speech or mobility.

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