ABSTRACT
The global economic system, like the systems within advanced industrial nations, does a lot of people a lot of good. Agencies such as the International Trade Center in Geneva, Switzerland, a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, never tire of reminding that trade creates wealth, which is certainly true. The economic growth rates were comparable in the two groups of countries, both in the aggregate and on a per capita basis, but the amounts of growth were far higher in high-income countries than in low-income countries. This is a matter of simple arithmetic. The World Bank's data indicate that the median per capita economic growth of developing countries from 1980 to 1998 was 0.0 percent. A UN report pointed out that in the 1980s, two-thirds of the world's developing countries had little or no economic growth.
