The developing world’s rapid growth has sharply cut extreme poverty, created a new middle class and put the economies of Brazil, China and India on a path to overtake the globe’s wealthiest nations, the UN said.
Although developing nations are now driving economic growth, a lack of action on climate change and persistent inequalities could threaten those gains, the United Nations Development Programme said in a study.
The report sees a “dramatic rebalancing of global economic power” and forecasts that the combined economic output of Brazil, China and India will surpass that of the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Italy by 2020.
The most striking changes had occurred in the southern hemisphere, a region which had seen “unprecedented” rises in living standards, said the study, titled “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World.”
“Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast,” said the report presented in Mexico City.
China and India doubled their per capita economic output in less than 20 years, a rate twice as fast as Europe and North America experienced during the Industrial Revolution.
The proportion of people living in extreme poverty worldwide fell from 43 per cent in 1990 to 22 per cent in 2008, with more than 500,000 million people rising above the poverty line in China alone.
