The Economist om världens utveckling

The Economist skriver om världens framsteg:

In China 25 years ago, over 600m people—two-thirds of the population—were living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below 180m. In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. [Med reservation för Världsbankens reviderade siffror.]

Digging canals and building water-treatment plants has increased the number of people with access to safe water: in South Asia, for instance, the number of those without clean water has been nearly halved since 1990. [Enligt Unicef fick mer än 1,2 miljarder människor bättre tillgång till dricksvatten mellan 1990 och 2004 (från 78 till 83 procent av världens befolkning).]

In 2007 Unicef, the United Nations child-welfare body, said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five. [Samma rapport som ovan.]

The long march to literacy is nearing an end: three-quarters of people aged 15-25 were literate in 1975; now the rate is nearly nine-tenths.

A generation ago the biggest worry about poor countries was over-population. /.../ In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25 years). [Det kommer jag återkomma till.]

Last year the global economy entered its fifth year of over 4% annual growth—the longest period of such strong expansion since the early 1970s. /.../ Moreover, growth was spread around fairly evenly. According to the World Bank, national income in the European Union rose slightly more than in America for the first time in a decade. Growth in East Asia was 10%, in South Asia over 8%, in eastern Europe almost 7% and in Africa, thanks to the commodity boom, over 6%. [Tidigare skriver de även att studier visat att en enprocentig ökning i nettoinkomst per capita i fattiga länder leder till att den extrema fattigdomen minskar med 1,3 procent.]

The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005. /.../ In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s. [Den rapporten skrev jag om här.]

Nu ser visserligen världsekonomin något skakig ut för tillfället, och klimathysterikerna verkar vinna mark i sin strävan att sänka levnadsstandarden för såväl fattiga som rika, men jag skulle ändå bli förvånad om inte 2008 blir ett fantastiskt år att titta tillbaka på.