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David Dodwell

The ‘Global Top one per cent’ — the lucky 70 million people who have captured a massive share of the new wealth generated in the world economy over the past 30 years — must be squirming over their Bollinger about the public enemy status they are beginning to acquire worldwide.
All the more so with the publication of a hard-hitting new book by the Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic.
Global Inequality reveals that the main losers of the past three decades of globalisation have been the western middle classes.
No wonder then that politics is turning so populist and pear-shaped in so many countries.
In fact, Milanovic quite persuasively puts inequality worldwide at the heart of a wide range of ills, as threatening our economies and threatening our long-cherished democracies too.
Alongside these main losers, the main gainers of globalisation have not just been the ‘Top one per cent’, and the 1,500 billionaires worldwide at their heart.
They have also been Asia’s emergent middle class — led by China of course. And this has led to a strange outcome; while inequality inside individual countries has widened, inequality between countries has narrowed — and strikingly.
This leads Milanovic to some tough conclusions; the shift in economic power away from the rich west to Asia has been strong and will continue; the economies of the west face decades of stagnation ahead, with their middle classes hurting the most; we see the emergence of a “global plutocracy” built around the interests of the ‘Top one per cent’, which will compromise our democracies, and possibly trigger populist and “localist” backlashes.
We can see this already in the US with Donald Trump. In the UK, with the right-wing call for exit from the European Union and this week in the election of Davao Mayor Duterte as the Philippines’ new president. Our Occupy movement and youthful unrest are likely part of the same phenomenon.
Milanovic sees China’s emergence since the late 1970s as an “epochal change” and China “the great income equaliser.”
In 1970 US GDP per capita was 20 times that of China. It is now less than four times.
But we now see a perverse reversal about to occur; for the past three decades, rising wealth and incomes in China have provided the main force behind narrowing the wealth gap between rich and poor nations.
Average incomes for China’s middle have tripled in the two decades from 1988. But now average incomes in China are coming close to the world average. Once incomes pass the global average, then their continued rise will actually make inequality worse, not reduce it.
To keep global inequality from getting worse, we will need to see incomes strongly rise in other huge poor countries, like Indonesia and Brazil — and of course India.
We might be a long time waiting.
Milanovic identifies different distinct forms of inequality: the first he calls “existential inequality”, and it arises from the sheer luck of where you are born.
Simply by being born in the US rather than the Congo, your income will on average be 93 times higher. This means that 12 per cent of America’s population live gilded lives among the ‘Top one per cent’, along with nine per cent of Japanese or Swiss. By the way, to be in this Top one per cent, your average after-tax income needs to be over $71,000 a year — which puts a very large number of you reading this article in the ‘Top one per cent’.
This compares with the global median income of $1,400. So it is easy to see how existential wealth feeds itself; a one per cent rise in income for someone earning $71,000 would be $710 — equal to a 50 per cent jump for someone earning the median income.

He then identifies “legal inequality,” by which most legal systems entrench the privileges and advantages of social elites.
Then there is income and wealth inequality, by which inherited wealth buys access to the best education and to property wealth that protects and preserves privilege.
Here, he identifies an interesting perversity — that more women in the workforce, on higher incomes, are actually aggravating inequality — because a self-selection process tends to mean that wealthy, well-educated women partner with wealthy, well-educated men — making such couples even more elite.
And there is “meritocratic inequality” — where political commitment to supposedly-equalising meritocratic arrangements actually aggravates inequality.
He asks what is the merit of getting everyone to start at the same starting line, if one competitor has a Ferrari, and another a bicycle.
It is these inequalities inside individual countries that account for the widening rich-versus-poor gap in so many rich western economies and a hollowing out of the politically-moderating middle classes, that is putting democracy in danger.
As the super-rich use wealth to secure political influence, so politicians respond mainly to the concerns of the rich, sowing the seeds of “dictatorships of the propertied class” disguised in the garb of democracy.
He sees producers giving priority to luxury goods and governments cutting welfare spending, instead of giving priority to policing, and infrastructure-building.
Whether you agree with his politics or not, the statistical support for Milanovic’s story is as compelling as that garnered by Pinketty last year.
He is persuasive that political concern about rising inequality is more than a passing fad, and that we need to think about narrowing the gaps, inside countries in particular, if we are going to avoid very ugly social and political developments worldwide.
His solutions; first ensure equal access to good education and widespread property ownership — uncontroversial, except it is easy to see even here in Hong Kong how hard it is to achieve this.
Secondly, more controversially, he calls for lower obstacles to migration and to international labour movement. He argues that this would be massively significant in reducing inequality between countries.
Again, governments around the world facing the present political pickle linked with global recession and massive migration into Europe from Syria and Iraq, are likely to run a mile from Milanovic’s recommendation.
That of course does not make him wrong.
David Dodwell is Executive Director of the Hong Kong-APEC Trade Policy Group


Global inequality under the microscope

New book puts spotlight on world’s wealthiest one per cent.

TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY FRANCESCO FONTEMAGGI (FILES) This file photo taken on April 28, 2016 shows an activist who climbed onto the monument at the center of the Place de la republique, unfolding a banner reading "We occupy better than this" during the Nuit Debout, or "Up All Night" movement on April 28, 2016 in Paris. Six months after Paris terror attacks in November which killed 130 people, the jihadist threat remains and the consquences of the attacks are still visible, including a slowdown in the touristic industry. But a sign the situation returns to normal, bars and restaurants hit by the attacks reopened, the Bataclan, which is under renovation, scheduled concerts in November and the Place de la Republique, which became a memorial for the victims in 2015, is now an occupy-style gathering for the youth-led "Nuit debout" movement to protest the French government's proposed labour reforms. / AFP PHOTO / JOEL SAGET

A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, sprays paint with toy water gun on the facade of the Macedonia's Public Revenue Office headquarters oin Skopje, as part of series of protests that have been running almost for a month now Photo; AFP Robert Atanasovski

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New book puts spotlight on world’s wealthiest one per cent.


Global inequality under the microscope

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}New book puts spotlight on world’s wealthiest one per cent.

New book puts spotlight on world’s wealthiest one per cent.