ABSTRACT
Global markets, global technology, and global ideas can enrich the lives of people everywhere. As we saw, the 1990s was a period of rapid progress for many countries, particularly in Asia, as integration into the global economy, good social policies, and economic power at home saw hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty. But, as the UNDP Human Development Report 2003 makes clear, that is only half the picture. More than fifty countries actually got poorer during the 1990s. Today we face a development crisis where more than one billion people continue to languish in extreme poverty, most of them without clean water to drink or enough food to eat, beset by diseases from HIV/AIDS to tuberculosis, lacking access to schools and healthcare, and living in an environment that by nearly every measure is rapidly degrading. It is a world of desperate inequality, where the world’s richest 1 percent of people are worth as much as the poorest 57 percent; and where the richest 10 percent of the US population has an income equal to that of the poorest 43 percent of the world.
