Gap Grows Between World’s Rich, Poor

The gap between rich and poor is widening around the globe, further distancing the world’s poorest people from the benefits of recent economic growth, a new U.N. report said Monday.

“The world has become more economically polarized, both between countries and within countries,” James Gustave Speth, U.N. Development Program administrator wrote in this year’s Human Development Report.

“If present trends continue, economic disparities between industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable to inhuman,” Speth wrote in the report, which was to be officially released Wednesday.

The report showed that a large number of the world’s poor are being left behind by a current wave of prosperity. Even though the world’s economy surged ahead over the past three decades, about 1.6 billion people - about one-fourth of the world’s population - are are worse off than they were 15 years ago.

At the national level, 89 countries - most of them in the developing world - are poorer now than they were 10 or more years ago. Among the world’s wealthy nations, only three - Canada, Finland and Iceland - are worse off than they were in the 1980s.

But in one encouraging note, the report said that the quality of life - by its measure - has risen faster in the developing world over the last 30 years than it has in the developed world in the last century.