Združeni narodi so pravkar objavili novo Poročilo o človekovem razvoju (Human Development Report 2013 – The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World). Pomembna ugotovitev poročila je, da se razmere za življenje v t.i. državah v razvoju izboljšujejo bistveno hitreje, kot so predvidevali v prejšnjem poročilu:
“The rise of the South is unprecedented in its speed and scale,” the 2013 Report says. “Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast.” … The Report
showsthat more than 40 developing
countries have made greater human
development gains in recent decades than
would have been predicted. These
achievements, it says, are largely attributable
to sustained investment in education, health
care and social programmes, and open
engagement with an increasingly
interconnected world.
Tule je še nekaj kratkih izvlečkov:
- Today, the South as a whole produces about half of world economic output, up from about a third in 1990.
- Latin America, in contrast to overall global trends, has seen income inequality fall since 2000.
- There is a clear positive correlation between past public investment in social and physical infrastructure and progress on the Human Development Index.
- Developing countries trade more among themselves than with the North, and this trend can go much further.
- China and India doubled per capita economic output in less than 20 years—a rate twice as fast as that
during the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America. “The Industrial Revolution was a story
of perhaps a hundred million people, but this is a story about billions of people,” says Khalid Malik, the
2013 Report’s lead author.
- By 2020, the Report projects, the combined output of the three leading South economies—China, India,
Brazil—will surpass the aggregate production of the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France,
Italy and Canada.
- With living standards rising in much of the South, the proportion of people living in extreme income
poverty worldwide plunged from 43 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 2008, including more than 500
million people lifted from poverty in China alone. As a result, the world has already achieved the main
poverty eradication target of the Millennium Development Goals, which called for the share of people
living on less than US$1.25 a day to be cut by half from 1990 to 2015.
- Developing countries nearly doubled their share of world merchandise trade from 25 percent to 47
percent between 1980 and 2010, the Report notes. Trade within the South was the biggest factor in that
expansion, climbing from less than 10 percent to more than 25 percent of all world trade in the past 30
years, while trade between developed countries fell from 46 percent to less than 30 percent. Trade
between countries in the South will overtake that between developed nations, the Report projects.
Increasing openness to trade correlates with rising human development achievement in most developing
countries.
- The South is increasingly interdependent and interconnected. Mobile phones with Internet links are now
found in most households in Asia and Latin America, and in much of Africa– and most of those
affordable smart phones are produced by South-based companies. Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and
Mexico now have more daily social media traffic than any country except the United States. The South’s
growing global interconnections are personal as well virtual: migration between developing countries
recently surpassed net migration from South to North.
- The world is witnessing an epochal “global rebalancing.” The rise of the South reverses the huge shift
that saw Europe and North America eclipse the rest of the world, beginning with the industrial
revolution, through the colonial era to the two World Wars in the 20th century. Now another tectonic
shift has put developing countries on an upward curve. The Report predicts that the so-called “Rise of
the South” should continue and could even accelerate as the 21st century unfolds.
- Global institutions have not yet caught up to this historic change. China, with the world’s second largest
economy and biggest foreign exchange reserves, has but a 3.3 percent share in the World Bank, less than
France’s 4.3 percent. India, which will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous country, does
not have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And Africa, with a billion people in 54 sovereign
nations, is under-represented in almost all international institutions.
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