Global Good News

"The Industrial Revolution was a story of perhaps 100 million people, but this is a story about billions of people. For the first time in 140 years, the combined output of the developing world's three leading economies -- Brazil, China and India -- is about equal to the combined GDP of the long-standing industrial powers of the North -- Canada, France, Germany,Italy, United Kingdom and the United States."
Khalid Malik, lead author of the UN's 2013 Human Development Report

 The United Nations has released its 2013 Human Development Report, and its conclusions are that much has been successfully done through international co-operation to alleviate the great burden of poverty and hunger in the world. "Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast."

In countries like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania and India whose endemic poverty among their millions of undernourished, underprivileged, underserved people is legendary, fortunes are changing. Slowly, people are finding employment, and though still impoverished by First World standards, there is a steadily rising lower middle class, and hunger is being alleviated, living conditions improving.

The conventionally wealthy, technologically advanced countries of the world, the traditional First World countries have, on the other hand, experienced some notable backsliding. Unemployment is up dramatically and it is growing, national economies are faltering, the large middle class is under duress and many of them are joining the ranks of the poverty-stricken, all as a result of the global financial meltdown of 2008.

Oxford University has issued a report of its own in a study of trends in extreme poverty prevailing in twenty-two of the world's poorest countries, where about two billion people live; a significant proportion of the world's population. Their Poverty and Human Development report comes to the conclusion that if current trends continue, the direst poverty in fully half of those 22 countries will be completely defeated within 20 years.

Despite all the protests around the activities of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to further open international markets, it is just that opening and the free trade that results from them that have helped the situation. State investments in literacy, and the emancipation of women in cultures that have traditionally been male dominated have done their part.