New Delhi, A new study has found that in 2023, about half of all people in the world lived in places where income inequality had increased, even though overall national income has gone up for 94 per cent of the global population since 1990.
About one-third of people lived in places where inequality had gone down, while roughly one-fourth lived in areas where both income and inequality had risen sharply since 1990, according to the journal ‘Nature Sustainability’.
Researchers, including those from Aalto University in Finland, said the study provides insights into trends in income inequality and valuable information to evaluate goal 10 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals ‘reduce inequalities within and among countries’.
Adopted by member states of the UN in 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a blueprint for achieving human progress, economic prosperity and planet health.
Three decades of income inequality data from across 151 nations was analysed.
“While gross national income has increased for most people globally , inequality has also increased for around 46-59 per cent of the global population, while it has decreased for 31-36 per cent,” the authors wrote.
Lead author Matti Kummu, professor at Aalto University, said, “This research gives us much more detail than the existing datasets, allowing us to zoom in on specific regions within countries.”
“This is significant because in many countries national data would tell us that inequality has not changed much over the past decades, while subnational data tells a very different story,” Kummu said.
India was among the case studies that the research looked at, including Brazil and China.
“Northern India has experienced stagnant inequality, whereas southern states have made more inclusive progress,” the authors said.
The relative success in the country’s southern region “a stronghold of the Indian left” was attributed to sustained investments in public health, education, infrastructure and economic development that benefited the local population more broadly, they said.
The differences “highlight the importance of moving beyond national averages to uncover the underlying dynamics of inequality and identify the drivers of inclusive growth,” the team wrote.
In Brazil, regional cash transfer programmes that give money to poor families as long as their children go to school and get vaccinated were found to have a potential correlation with reduced inequality.
The study also points to a collective failure to meet the UN’s SDG by 2030.
“Unfortunately, not only are we quite far from that goal, but the trend for rising inequality is actually stronger than we thought,” Kummu said.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
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