Rich nations are leaving poor behind in risk to global stability, UN says

A measure of how well and how long people live offers fresh evidence of a growing split between rich and poor countries, according to the United Nations, which warned widening global inequality risks stoking polarization and gridlock.

The UN’s Global Development Index measuring 193 countries — from Switzerland at the top to Somalia at the bottom — is projected to have reached a record high last year, according to a report Wednesday by the United Nations Development Program.

But the index — a blend of national income per capita, education and life expectancy — shows that 20 years of steadily narrowing inequalities between wealthy and poor nations is reversing.

Covid-19, an increasing number of global conflicts, including in Ukraine and Gaza, and threats to democracy have become “an unfortunate and avoidable fork” in the path toward development rather than a “short-lived setback,” the UN program said in the report.

Among the 35 least-developed nations — mostly from sub-Saharan and east Africa, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan — only 17 have recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, all 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — a group of rich, industrialized countries — have surpassed it.

“What surprised us is less that the world is recovering,” Achim Steiner, head of the program, said in an interview. “What did surprise us is that, in its simplest form, the rebound is partial. It’s incomplete and unequal.”

The report also found that global development is no longer on track to reach a “very high” level of progress by 2030, a deadline to meet so-called sustainable development goals established by the UN in 2015.

Intertwined with widening inequality, according to the report, are rising levels of reported sadness, stress and worry, a reversal from only a few years ago when “well-being had never been higher, poverty never lower.”

One drag on international action to address issues such as climate change and poverty is what the UN program calls a “democracy paradox”: While 90% of those it surveyed globally support democracy, more than half supported leaders that risk undermining it in practice.

“Populism has become an unhelpful pressure valve,” it said in the report. “The result is that institutions are failing to deliver.”

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