The State of the World—The Views of Economists and the Predictions of Futurologists

Abstract

Some three-quarters of the world’s population, or about 2,800 million people, have a low standard of living; of these, 1,000 million live in conditions of extreme poverty. Most of these people live in the rural areas and are engaged in agriculture or agriculture-related activities. Figure 2.1 shows the difference in G.N.P. per head between some of the developing and the developed nations. These are of course averages and averages can be misleading, since they can conceal very large individual differences. For example, even in the U.S.A. there is a poverty belt, and similarly in some of the developing countries there are small sectors of considerable wealth. In many of the developing countries the differentials between the very poor sector and that of the very rich are greater than in the industrial nations.