The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted by 189 nations during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000. Eight MDGs were developed which responded to the world’s main development challenges.
The goals ranged from halving extreme poverty rates to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions.
They have so far galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest. The UN is also working with governments, civil society and other partners to build on the momentum generated by the MDGs and carry on with an ambitious post-2015 development agenda.
The MDGs aimed to measure development in eight categories, using 60 separate indicators. The final two goals were aimed more at developed countries, aiming to monitor things such as carbon dioxide emissions, development aid donations and fair trade rules.
Following the success of the eight MDGs, they have since ‘developed’ into seventeen global goals for sustainable development
The Global Goals for Sustainable Development
The Millennium Development Goals – Progress to 2015 (selected)
The infographics below provide the headlines….
And some further MDG achievements….
The proportion of undernourished people in developed regions halved between 1990 and 2015.
In 1990, nearly half of the population in the developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day. This rate dropped to 14 per cent in 2015.
The average proportion of women in parliament has doubled
The net loss of forests has reduced from an average of 8.3 million hectares annually in the 1990s to an average of 5.2 million hectares annually between 2000 and 2010.
Remaining Development Goals (selected)
At the global level more than 800 million people are still living in extreme poverty
Globally, an estimated 795 people are malnourished
Globally, 300 million workers lived below the $1.25 a day poverty line in 2015.
The proportion of the working-age population that is employed – has fallen from 62 per cent in 1991 to 60 per cent in 2015.
In countries affected by conflict, the proportion of out-of-school children increased from 30 per cent in 1999 to 36 per cent in 2012.
Globally, about three quarters of working-age men participate in the labour force, compared to half of working-age women.
Women continue to experience significant gaps in terms of poverty, labour market and wages, as well as participation in private and public decision-making
Between 1990 and 2012, global emissions of carbon dioxide increased by over 50 per cent.
The map below shows the regions where most and least progress was made over the 15 years of the Millennium Development Goals.
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region where the most progress is to be made.
Some strengths of the MDGs as indicators of development
Much broader range of indicators (60) – more validity! – Good for professional development workers!
Includes the developed nations (these also have targets – 7 and 8 especially)
NB – These have now become the ‘sustainable development goals’.
Some limitations of the MDGs as indicators of development
Not very ambitious – halving poverty by 2015, given up on the idea of ‘economic growth’.
Problems with some indicators – e.g. ‘finishing primary school’ doesn’t tell us about quality of education or how many days actually spent in school.
Do the MDGs lack ambition?
Sources Used
The main source used to write this post was the United Nations ‘Millennium Development Goals Progress Page’.
Since the 1990s, Equatorial Guinea has become one of the largest oil producing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is now the richest country per capita in Africa. It ranks 43rd in the world for gross domestic product per capita.
However, the oil revenue is distributed very unequally and most people see no benefit from the high GDP. the country ranks 144th on the UN’s 2014 Human Development Index.
What this means is that Equatorial Guinea fails to convert a relatively high income into high life expectancy and formal education for its people.
Equatorial Guinea – High GNI per Capita, Low Human Development (1)
Equatorial Guinea – Why High Income but Low Human Development?
For starters – Equatorial Guinea has been ‘blessed’ with a natural supply of oil and gas.
Most of the country’s income comes from oil and gas exports, as the export tree-map below shows (2012 figures)
However, the income doesn’t trickle down because of an autocratic government which controls the oil industry and uses the revenue to enrich itself and keep itself in power.
The current president of Equatorial Guinea is Teodoro Obiang, he has been quite literally running the country for three decades. He has extensive powers, including naming and dismissing members of the cabinet, making laws by decree, negotiating and ratifying treaties and serving as commander in chief of the armed forces.The anti-corruption lobby Transparency International describes Obiang as one of the world’s “most kleptocratic” living autocrats and has put Equatorial Guinea in the top 12 of its list of most corrupt states.
The advocacy group Global Witness has been lobbying the United States to act against Obiang’s son, Teodorin, who is vice-president and a government minister. It says there is credible evidence that he spent millions buying a Malibu mansion and private jet using corruptly acquired funds.
During the three decades of his rule, Obiang has shown little tolerance for opposition. While the country is nominally a democracy, elections have generally been considered a sham. According to Human Rights Watch, the dictatorship of President Obiang has used an oil boom to entrench and enrich itself further at the expense of the country’s people.
There’s also the fact that The U.S. Government and U.S. Corporations Support Obiang
Without the help of international oil corporations, it’s unlikely that Equatorial Guinea would have been able to drill for oil – think about it, drilling for oil requires heavy industry and lots of investment.
NB the government (which basically means Obiang’s family) only controls a 5% stake of this particular field, but this tiny stake from this one oil field returns them something in the region of $300 000 a day, and there are many more oil fields.
Despite his dismal human rights and corruption record, Obiang was recently invited (in 2014) to a U.S. African summit – along with a whole load of other human rights abusers on the continent. The general gist of the article is that the U.S. is tolerant of corrupt governments in Africa because if they don’t do business with them, then the Chinese will, there’s also the fact that they might be useful in combating Islamic extremism.
Related Posts (forthcoming)
This country case-study is also useful for illustrating how TNCs are not interested in promoting social development in other parts of the world.
(1) You’ll notice from the graph above that Cuba is a good example of a country which has a relatively high human development compared to its GNI per capita, more on that later.
International organisations such as the World Bank prefer to measure development using economic indicators. There are three main economic indicators which are used to give an indication of the overall economic health of a country.
This post has primarily been written for students studying the Global Development option for A-level Sociology.
Three Economic Indicators of Development
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the total economic value of goods and services (expressed in US dollars) produced within the borders of a country in the course of a year and available for consumption in the market place.
Gross National Product (GNP) is the same but includes the value of all services produced at home and abroad. A country such as Ghana will have a relatively similar GDP to GNP because it doesn’t have many companies which produce things abroad: most production takes place within Ghana. America, on the other hand, which is where many Transnational Corporations are based, has a much higher GNP than GDP – Think about MacDonald’s for example –all of those Big Macs sold outside of the USA won’t appear in the GDP of the USA but will appear in the GNP.
Gross National Income (GNI) a hideous oversimplification of this is that it’s ‘Gross Domestic Product + the additional income that self-employed people pay themselves +income received from abroad’. This matters to a lot of developing countries who don’t produce much but have large diasporas, or populations living permanently abroad. Take Gambia for example (the country Paul Mendy takes your old toys to at Christmas) – 1/6th of its GNI is from money sent by relatives who abroad, this would not be included in either GDP or GNP.
You get slightly different country rankings if you use GNP or GDP rather than GNI. Don’t worry too much about the differences between the above – with a few exceptions* most developing countries tend to have similar GDPs, GNPs and GNI*s.
GDP and GNI per capita in India
*If you look at India’s Gross Domestic Product, it is the 6th richest country in the world, but if you look at its Gross National Income per Capita, it falls to the mid 100s, due to its enormous population, abut also due to the fact that it consumes a lot of the goods it produces itself, so it doesn’t export much, so there’s not a lot of income coming into the country.
‘Per Capita’ and ‘Purchasing Power Parity’
Gross National Product Per Capita – GDP/ GNP are often divided by the total population of a country in order to provide a figure per head of population, known as GDP/ GNP per capita.
The cost of living varies in different countries – so one dollar will buy you a lot more rice in India than it would in America. Purchasing Power Parity figures for GNI per capita factor in the cost of living which is useful as it gives you more of an idea of the actual standard of living in that country for the average person.
Gross National Income Per Capita
This section provides a closer look different levels of ‘development’ according to this particular economic indicator. Remember, global rankings will vary depending on whether you use GNI, GNP, or GDP.
One measurement of development The World Bank uses is Gross National Income (GNI), which can be crudely defined as the total value of goods and services produced in a country in a year plus any income from abroad. If you divide GNI by the number of people in the country, you get the average amount of income per person, or GNI per capita.
GNI per capita is widely regarded as a good indicator of the general standard of living in a country, and it is a good starting point for giving us an idea of the extent of global inequalities between countries. For example, the United Kingdom has a GNI per capita of about $43 000, while India has a GNI per capita of about $1600, which is more than 20 times greater.
The World Bank’s map of countries by Gross National Income per capita map is a useful, interactive resources to easily find out how most countries fair by this indicator of development.
The World Bank’s Four Income Categories
The World Bank categorises countries into one of four categories based Gross National Income per capita (per head): high, upper middle, lower middle and low income countries.
High income = $12, 536 or more – about 60 countries, including most of Europe
Upper middle income = $4,046 – $12,535 – about 60 countries, includes South Africa and China
Lower middle income = $1,036 – $4, 045 – about 50 countries, mostly in Africa, includes India
Low income = $1,035 or less – about 30 countries, mostly in Sub-Saharan
Comparing countries by GNI per Capita and total GDP
Question to consider: Why do you think the top ten countries are so different when judged by total GDP compared to GNI per capita?
Evaluating the Usefulness of Economic Indicators of Development
Three Advantages of using GDP/ GNP/ GNI as an indicator of development
GNI figures provide a snap-shot indication of the huge difference between the more developed and less developed countries. In 2016, the GNP per capita in the UK was $43000 while in India it was only $1600. This means that there is 20 times as much money per person in the UK compared to in India
Gross National Income figures are also closely correlated with social development – generally speaking the higher the GNI per capita, the better the education and health indicators are in a country.
Total GDP figures give us an indication of who the most powerful nations are on earth in terms of military power. It’s not a perfect correlation, but the USA, China, Russia and the UK are all in the top ten for GDP and they are the biggest arms producers and consumers in the world too.
Four limitations of using GDP/ GNP/ GNI as an indicators of development
Quality of life (Social Development) may be higher or lower than suggested by GNP per capita.
They don’t tell us about inequalities within countries. The USA has one of the highest GNPs in the world but some extreme poverty.
A lot of production in developing countries may not be included. For example, subsistence based production is consumed locally in the community, and not sold in the market place. Similarly goods obtained illegally on the black market are not included in GNP measurement
They are very western concepts, equating production and economic growth with development. Some countries may not want economic growth and have different goals (Bhutan)
The United States – economically developed but socially retarded?
The USA is a good example of a country that demonstrates why we can’t rely on economic indicators alone to give us a valid indication of how developed a country is. Despite ranking number 1 for total GDP, the USA does a lot worse on many social indicators of development – See this post – ‘The USA – an undeveloped country?’ for more details.
Review Questions
Define Gross National Income Per Capita and be able to identify some high income and lower income countries.
Explain the difference between GNI, GDP, GNP, and understand the significance of Purchasing Power Parity.
Outline three strengths of using economic indicators of development
Outline at least three reasons why GNP may not be valid measurements of ‘development’
Saudi Arabia is well known for its high levels of gender inequality – and this week, Janice Turner pointed out that it is the only nation, in ‘flagrant disregard of the Olympic Charter, that will not be sending any women to the games. The rational for this is that exercise, according to the Saudi Religious Police, prompts girls to wear scanty clothes, mix with men and leave the house ‘unnecessarily’. (I got this from The Week – I wouldn’t post a link to The Times in any case because of its pay wall)
Turner points out that there is precedent for banning Saudi Arabia from the Olympics – as happened in 2000 with the Taliban, and as happens to any country practising Racial rather than gender apartheid.
This gender apartheid is well documented – even if not widely publicised – Just some of the ways in which women are oppressed in Saudi Arabia include
Women are generally expected to wear the full Hijab in public – with only the eyes and hands being visible.
There is a strict policy of sex segregation in public places – including work places and restaurants, with facilities often being of a lesser quality than for men.
Even though women’s literacy is high compared to some countries, educational opportunities are heavily gendered – with women being effectively prohibited from studying traditionally male subjects such as engineering and law – 97% of Female degrees are in education or the social sciences, which are deemed to be suitable for women.
Women are not allowed to travel without being accompanied by a male relative – resulting in their Being banned from driving – Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world to do so – which has actually led to a Facebook campaign and women posting videos of themselves driving
All of this is pretty grim from the perspective of most people in the West, and serves to illustrate numerous themes in Sociology –
Firstly, Saudi Arabia has to be one of the best examples of overt patriarchy preventing women from having equal opportunities with men – and thus shows us the continued relevance of Feminism globally. Of course you might take issue with this and argue that there are some pros to Saudi society too, but from the straightforward perspective of gender equality – women are clearly not equal with men.
Secondly, it demonstrates the limits of ‘Cultural Globalisation’ – clearly Liberal, or any type of Feminism, hasn’t effectively penetrated the boarders of this country.
Thirdly, Saudi Arabia is a very good example of the problems of relying on the standard statistical indicators of development – Saudi Arabia has a GNI per capita (PPP) of just over $23 000, ranking 56th in the world, and has a correspondingly high HDI (nearly – 0.8) – also ranking 56th.
However, on the ‘Gender Equality Index’, which compares the male-female rates of things such as political involvement, years in school, and the number of men and women in work, Saudi Arabia drops down to 135th (or thereabouts – I may’ve lost count!). Saudi Arabia must be the country that shows the biggest gap between its GNI/ HDI and it’s level of Gender Inequality.
I should just mention that things are on the up – women will be able to vote for the firs time in 2015, and are much more likely to be allowed to study abroad, for example, than in previous decades, but this relative liberalisation may not last forever, and, in any case, by the standards of gender equality in the west, Saudi Arabia has a long way to go until it rids itself of its gender apartheid.
The United States ranks either at the top, or very near the top on several of the main development indicators used by the World Bank and the United Nations, but if you look more closely you find that the United States might not be so ‘developed’ after all.
The U.S.A. – You don’t need to dig too deep to find squalor beneath the surface, in fact you don’t really need to dig at all!
This post starts out by exploring the seemingly positive indicators which suggest that the United States is one the most developed nations on earth, before looking at some other statistics and evidence which reveal the darker side of life in the United States, outlining some of the many areas where the U.S.A. looks very underdeveloped, despite its huge wealth and income.
Evidence for the apparent high levels of development in the United States
The U.S. ranks very high up the league tables for many economic indicators of development, such as Gross National Income, Gross National Product, and for total wealth. It also scores very highly in the United Nations Human Development Index which measure income, education and life-expectancy.
Gross National Income and Gross Domestic Product
The United States is the wealthiest country on earth by a long way, at least measured in terms of Nominal Gross National Income, where it’s GNI of $17 trillion is a long way ahead of second place China’s $10 trillion (2014 figures). GNI basically measures the value of goods produced in a country + wages earned abroad (fuller definition here).
The chart below shows rankings by GDP (Gross Domestic Product) which measures economic output in a slightly different way to GNI, but gives very similar rankings to the vast majority of countries when compared to the GNI rankings (see link above for the differences between GDP and GNI).
Top 10 countries by nominal GDP (Gross Domestic Product) 2015
In terms of GNI per capita (GNI per person), the United States is also very near the top of the league table, coming 6th if we exclude the tax havens at the top, and the only country with a population over 200 million anywhere near the top.
Wealth Indicators
According to Credit Suisse’s ‘World Wealth Report 2015‘, we see the same story in terms of wealth, where the Unites States remains one of the few countries with very high levels of wealth.
The Human Development Index
If we take a slightly more in-depth look at the development levels of the United States, then according to Human Development Index (2015 figures) which gives countries a score based on a combination of GNI per capita, the average levels of education and life expectancy, the USA is in the highest ‘very high human development’ category and it still ranks an impressive 8th (the U.K. is 14th), and as with GNI per capita is the only country with a huge population in the top 10.
Evidence of Underdevelopment in the United States
Despite its coming near the top of the league tables for many economic indicators, the U.S.A. comes much lower down many of the international league tables for social development, which suggests that the U.S.A. is failing to translate its enormous wealth and high levels of income into appropriate levels social development.
The rest of this post explores the relatively poor performance of the United States in terms of social development (and I look at some more economic indicators too.)
The United States has VERY HIGH income and wealth inequalities
According to the OECD, the USA was the third most unequal country in terms of income (2014 data).
The most graphic way of displaying this is through the GINI coefficient. This ranks nations according to equality – A nation where every individual’s income is equal would have a gini index of 0. A nation where one individual gets all income, while everyone else gets nothing would have a gini index of 100.
To put this in terms which might be slightly easier to understand: In the USA, the top 20% of income earners take home almost nine times as much as the bottom 20% of income earners.
(NB – The U.K. isn’t much better – with the income of the top 20% being 6 times greater than the income of the poorest 20%.)
The graph below illustrates the increasing income inequalities in America – the share of national pre-tax income going to the top 1% has increased from around 13% to 21% (for only 1% of the population), whereas the share of income which goes to the bottom 50% has decreased from around 19% to 13%.
In pre-tax income dollars, this means the top 1% earn an average of $1.3 million a year, while the bottom 50% of the American population earned an average of $16,000, which means that the top 1% earn 81 times the bottom 50%, compared to 1980 when it was only 27 times more.
Looking at post tax income, the difference isn’t so stark – the top 1% today earn 40* the bottom 50%, but again, if you look at the 40 year trend, the income of the rich has increased much faster than the income of the bottom 50%, whose income levels have more or less stagnated…
If we look at the distribution of wealth in America, rather than income, there is an even higher degree of inequality.
According to Allianz’s new Global Wealth Report (2015) which includes not just salary, but also property and investments held by a family found that America’s wealth inequality is even more gaping its income inequality.
An approximation of the unequal distribution of wealth in America
The U.S. has $63.5 trillion, or 41.6% of the world’s private wealth (next to China with 10.5%, the U.K. is 4th with 5.6%), but the U.S. also has the largest wealth inequality gap of 55 countries studied, according to the report.
Allianz calculated each country’s wealth Gini coefficient — a measure of inequality in which 0 is perfect equality and 100 would mean perfect inequality, or one person owning all the wealth. It found that the U.S. had the most wealth inequality, with a score of 80.56, showing the most concentration of overall wealth in the hands of the proportionately fewest people.
This is a very useful video providing an infographical overview of wealth inequality in the USA (2016)
These statistics on income and wealth inequality are one of the main reasons why I think it’s fair to argue that America is in some ways an underdeveloped country – because such unequal distribution of income and wealth means the people at the bottom are effectively marginalised and don’t benefit from all that wealth and income sloshing about – what we effectively have are pockets of people who don’t benefit from the economic growth (‘development’) which the country as a whole has enjoyed over the past decades.
At least the bottom 20% (about 50 million of people in the U.S.A) face a daily struggle to get by, really only earning just enough for the basics of life – housing, heating, food, utilities, transport, maybe enough to save for birthday presents and a decent Christmas, but that’s pretty much it
Some grim evidence for this lies in the fact that 30 million Americans still can’t afford health insurance (Fiscal Times 2016), with a further 20 million only benefiting from it because of Obamacare (which may be Trashed following Trump’s election), which totals 50 million, or about 20% of the population. If 50 million people lack sufficient money for health care, they sure as hell won’t have enough money to fully participate in the full-blown joys of consumerism which is so much part of American culture.
So that’s 30 million (possibly soon to rise back up to 50 million) people within the United States, unable to access basic health care, just like in many poorer countries, which is pretty compelling evidence for labeling the United States ‘underdeveloped’. (NB if those 50 million people made up a country, it would be 28th most populated country on earth, out of 233).
On top of this, the relatively poor in America also have to contend with everyone else’s wealth and income being conspicuously consumed and displayed around them – on the streets, but especially in the media (if they’re stupid enough to watch T.V, which is most people), which adds an aspect of indignity into just earning enough to get by.
Kim Kardashian – making the rest of us feel even more worthless?
Of course if you were to compare the richest 10% with the bottom 10% the multiplier effect would be even greater, and it’s this section of the population which will be most likely to experience the many problems that come with poverty and extreme relative deprivation – facing the insecurity of flexible working conditions, living on sink housing estates, the threat of homelessness, the worries of debt, and living in the midst of higher crime areas.
15% of the population of America live below the official poverty line
Obviously related the above statistics, The Atlantic notes that the official US census data shows that ‘14.9 per cent of Americans, or almost 47 million people, falling below the poverty threshold of about $24,000 for the year.’ (2014 figures).
HOWEVER, the supplemental data shows that the true figure is slightly higher – standing at 15.3%.
America has relatively low life expectancy and healthy life expectancy
In 2016, the USA ranked a dismal 53rd for Life Expectancy, and the USA is one of only very few countries with ‘very high’ human development where the average life expectancy of the population is below 80 (you can see this in the Human Development Index table above), and in fact, according to the table below, there are several countries which are nestled alongside the USA, such as Puerto Rico and Cuba, which are considerably poorer but do much better on this key indicator of human development.
If you look at World Health Organisation data on healthy life expectancy, then the relative development levels of the United States look even worse. There is a marked contrast between the USA and Europe European countries, which have similar levels of GNI per capita and education to the USA, have healthy life expediencies of 70+, while the United State’s healthy life expectancy languishes in the 65-69 bracket below, alongside the much poorer South American countries and China.America has 1.5 million children of primary-school age out of school
You might have thought that every industrialised, developed nation on earth had figured out how to keep 99% of its kids in school for 13 years or so, well America fails to do so. According to World Bank data, it has a dismal primary enrolment rate of 93%, which slips down to 86% for tertiary education, and there are nearly 1.5 million children out of school (2014 figures)
America is the 114th least peaceful country in the world
According to the Global Peace Index, America has witnessed the fourth largest decrease in peacefulness in last ten years, in terms of how far it’s regressed, it’s right next to Syria in the international league tables for the ten year decline in peacefulness.
America still has the highest military expenditure in the world
The Global Peace Index 2017 notes that: ‘The past year has been a deeply worrying one for the US, with the presidential campaign highlighting the deep divisions within American society. Accordingly, the score for intensity of organised internal conflict has worsened. Data have also shown a declining level of trust in government and other citizens which has generated a deterioration in the score for level of perceived criminality in society. Social problems within the US are also likely to become more entrenched and racial tensions may continue to simmer. Reflecting these tensions, rising homicide rates in several major American cities led to a deterioration in the homicide rate indicator, contributing to the decline in the US’s peace score.’
HOWEVER, the main contributing factor to America’s high violence rating is it’s continued high levels of expenditure on its military and heavy weaponry. Despite military expenditure declining in recent years, relative to other nations, the U.S. still spends a fortune on the machinery of violence.
On the subject of military expenditure…. America’s recent $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and support for their war against Yemen doesn’t help its peacefulness score. …
NB – This post is a work in progress, I’ll add to it at various points over the coming year…
Things to follow….
The United States are by far the largest nuclear power producer, with 33.2% of the world’s total, followed by France (17.1%) and Russia (7.0%). The United Kingdom’s production accounts for 2.9%.
This also means that the United States is the largest producer of nuclear waste, including Plutonium, an essential ingredient in nuclear weapons.
The case study of Nauru illustrates the potential catastrophic consequences of pursuing economic growth without considering the ecological consequences. It may only be one island but Klein argues that the logic which hollowed out Nauru is the same logic which has driven the global economy for the last 400 years.
Nauru – Hollowed out due to phosphorous mining
The extract below is taken from Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything‘ (2014: Chapter Five Beyond Extractivism)
Few places on earth embody the suicidal results of building our economies on polluting extraction more graphically than Nauru. Thanks to its mining of phosphate, Nauru has spent the last century disappearing from the inside out; now, thanks to our collective mining of fossil fuels, it is disappearing from the outside in.
For decades, the tiny South Pacific Island of Nauru, home to only 10 000 people, seemed to be an example of a developing country which was doing everything right.
During the 1970s and 80s, the island was periodically featured in press reports, as a place of almost obscene riches, much as Dubai is invoked today, and in the mid-80s Nauru was reported as having the highest GDP capita in the world.
All of this was due to the fact that Nauru was made up almost pure phosphate, a valuable fertiliser, which the Nauruans had been shipping to mainly Australia since they gained their independence in 1968.
Extraction had been going on long before, since 1900, carried out by a series of colonial rulers, who had a simple plan for Nauru once all the phosphate had been extracted – simply ship the islanders to another island. In other words, Nauru was developed in order to disappear – an acceptable (and largely invisible) sacrifice to make for the advancement of industrial agriculture.
When the Nauruans themselves took control of their country in 1968, they had hopes of reversing the hollowing out of their island. They put large chunks of their mining revenue into a trust fund, with the intention of winding down the mining operation and rehabilitating their island’s ecology. However, this long term plan failed as Nauru’s government received catastrophically bad investment advice and the countries mining wealth was squandered.
As a result, rather than being wound-down throughout the 70s and 80s the mining continued unabated and Nauruans benefited from the royalties which rolled in – one consequence was a radical change in diet as islanders came to eat large amounts of processed food (as one resident recalls – ‘during the golden era we didn’t cook, we at in restaurants) which resulted in Nauru becoming the fattest place on earth (today it has the highest levels of obesity and the highest levels of diabetes in the world). Another consequence of high levels of cash was high levels of corruption amongst public officials.
Another consequence was, of course, the hollowing out of the island – in the 1960s Nauru could still have passed as a pleasant tropical island, but the 1990s it was a hollow shell with a small strip around the edge where people lived.
Machinery used to extract phosphorous from Nauru
Now the island faces a double bankruptcy – with 90% of the island depleted from mining it faces ecological bankruptcy and with a debt of at least $800 million it faces financial bankruptcy as well.
But this is not the end of Nauru’s problems – it now also faces rising sea levels and inland water shortages because of climate change.
This isn’t the end of the misery of Nauru – because in the past decade the island has become a dumping ground of another sort – In an effort to raise much needed revenue it has agreed to house an offshore detention centre for the government of Australia, in what has become known as ‘the Pacific Solution’. Australian navy and customs ships intercept boats of migrants, most from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and immediately fly them to Nauru where they languish in a detention centre, unsure of their status, sometimes up to five years.
The detention centre for refugees on Nauru
Amnesty International has called the camp ‘cruel’ and ‘degrading’ and one journalist has likened it to a death factory because conditions are so bad that people have been driven to attempt suicide.
Nauru is only an extreme case – there are plenty of other examples which are similar, if not as bad…
Unfortunately for us, the logic which has led to such devastation and cruelty on Nauru is the same logic which has underpinned the last 400 years of ‘development’. This logic is the logic of ‘extractivism’ – a non-reciprocal, dominance based relationship with the earth, one of purely taking. The opposite is stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continues.
Extractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones – places that, to the extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic progress.
This extractivist thinking, unfortunately, lies behind not only the whole history of modernity and colonialism, and obviously neoliberalism, but also behind Socialism, including most of the recent leftist movements in Latin America, because despite their advances in bringing greater equality, national income is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Even the mainstream in the Green Movement are failing to challenge the extractivist model because they have come under the thrall of large-scale, big tech solutions to climate-change, rather than accepting as necessity that the earth requires us to consume less.
Pretty much the only ray of hope for a sustainable future according to Klein lies in the Scandinavian social-democratic models, which are going to take a globalised grass-roots movement to realise on an international level.
Sources used to write this post:
Summarised from ‘Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ (2014)
Smoking is on the increase in several low income and middle income countries according to this World Health Organisation data, published in the World Bank’s recent review of 2016
According to the World Health Organisation up to 80% of the world’s tobacco users now live in low and middle income countries, with younger people especially taking up smoking in increasing numbers.
Why is Smoking Increasing in Poorer Countries?
In Short, it seems that since governments in developed countries have made it more difficult for tobacco companies to kill people in rich countries, they’ve now moved on to trying to kill people in poor countries instead.
The latest evidence shows that tobacco industry marketing remains a significant global problem, particularly for people in the poorest countries who are the most exposed to it. Our study examined tobacco marketing in 16 countries.
In communities in low-income countries, 81 times more tobacco adverts were observed than in high-income countries.
People in lower-income countries were 46 times more likely to hear radio adverts, 11 times more likely to see poster adverts and nine times more likely to see television adverts than those living in high-income countries.
Access to tobacco was also higher in poorer countries. In low-income countries, we observed two and a half times more stores selling tobacco in the communities in the low-income and lower-middle-income countries than in the high-income countries. Worryingly, 64% of stores visited sold single cigarettes compared with just 2.8% in high-income countries.
This high level of marketing in poorer countries is consistent with the tobacco industry’s targeting of these countries. They are key to the industry’s future. In the west, the tobacco industry’s profits continue to increase despite the decline in smoking rates , but it is unclear how long this pricing power will hold out in the face of growing regulations.
How to Reduce Smoking in the Developing World?
The World Health Organisation notes that there are several things that effectively reduce the use of tobacco consumption:
Banning positive advertising for cigarettes, although there are only total bans in 29 countries worldwide.
Promoting negative advertising – those horrible picture adds about how smoking causes disease apparently work
Taxation – a 10% increase in the price reduces smoking by 5% in low income countries.
NB – A further challenge here is tackling Organised Crime – and their role in smuggling tax-free cigarettes, which can subvert national taxation policies.
This is a useful little data-case-study for lots of reasons
It’s a good example of the negative role TNCs play in development
It’s a good example of a critique of neoliberalism – it seems that regulation by the government – of advertising and through taxes for example – can really help reduce smoking.
This kind of reminds me of ‘Runaway World’ – we know what works to reduce smoking, but what with both TNCs and Organised crime having so much to gain financially from cigarettes, it seems unlikely that governments are going to get a handle on this problem any time soon!
Finally this is also a slap in the face to ethnocentrism – You (I did until today!) were probably under the impression that smoking’s on the decline – well it may be in the UK – but looked at globally it’s not.
A brief summary of part of Arundhati Roy’s ‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’ – In which she explores some of the consequences of privatisation (part of neoliberalisation) in India.
‘Trickle down hasn’t worked in India, but gush up certainly has’
The era of the privatisation of everything has made the Indian economy one of the fasted growing in the world and most of this wealth has gushed up to India’s Corporate Elite.
In India today, a nation of 1.2 billion people, one hundred people own assets equivalent to 25% of the GDP, while a 300 million strong middle class live among the ghosts of the 250 00 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves and the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed and live on less than twenty Indian rupees a day.
The most egregious expression of this inequality is Antilla, a building on Altamount Road in Mumbai which belongs to India’s richest man Mukesh Ambanni. It is the most expensive dwelling ever built: it has 27 floors, including 6 for parking, 3 helipads, 600 servants and a 27 story vertical wall of grass. Ambanni is worth $20 billion dollars and his company, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) has a market capitalisation of $47 billion.
Ambanni’s RIL Corporation is one of a handful which run India, some of the others being Tata and Vedanta, the later of which are truly global in scope – Tata, for example, runs more than one hundred companies in 80 countries.
The consequence of this concentration of wealth, is an increase in corruption, or as Roy puts it – ‘As gush up continues, so more money flows through the institutions of government’. As an example, in 2011, a corrupt minister of communications and information undervalued 2G phone licences by $40 billion dollars, to the benefit of the telecommunications companies which now profit from them, effectively costing Indian taxpayers $40 billion of revenue.
How the Elite in India Benefit from Neoliberal Policies
The way this typically works is that a corrupt government official signs a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ (MoU) with a Corporation which privatises a chunk of publicly owned land, giving that corporation the right to use that land to establish a business – this either takes the form of mining the raw materials from under the land, or establishing a range of other projects such as Agribusinesses, Special Economic Zones, Dams, and even Formula One racing circuits.
Taxes are typically kept very low in these deals – often sow low in that local people see little of the financial benefit of the new business.
Chhattisgarh
This is especially true were mining is concerned. In 2005, for example, the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Jharkhand signed hundreds of memorandums of understanding with private corporations, turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore and other minerals for a pittance – royalties (effectively taxes) ranged from 0.5% to 7%, with the companies allowed to keep up to 99% of the revenue gained from these resources. (Allowing people like Ambanni to build their 27 story houses, rather than the money being used for food for the majority of the Indian population.)
In a third strand of Neoliberal policy, companies are subjected to very little regulation. It seems that they are allowed to develop their projects without protecting the environment or paying any compensation to people who are negatively affected by these projects, as indicated in the case study below:
Tata Steel in Chhattisgarh, North East India
Only days after the Chhattisgarh government signed an MoU with Tata Steel, a vigilante militia was established (known as the Salwa Judum). Organised by the state government and funded by Tata Steel the Salwa Judum initiated a ground clearance operation to eradicate the local forest peoples so Tata could set up its steel plant.
The Salwa Judum
The Salwa Judum burned, raped and murdered its way through 600 local villages forcing 50 000 people into police camps and displacing a further 350 000. To keep these displaced persons in check, the government then deployed 200 000 paramilitary troops to the region to make sure that it remained a stable climate for investment and economic growth.
An Adivasi (local tribal group) protest
According to Roy the government has labelled these people ‘Maoist Rebels’, but in reality they are just displaced peoples.
Possibly the strongest piece of case-study evidence supporting the Marxist view of crime
In December 1984, an explosion at a pesticide plant in Bhopal India, then owned by the American multi-national Union Carbide, lead to deadly gas fumes leaking into the surrounding atmosphere and toxic chemicals into the ground. That was more than 25 years, but, according to the Bhopal Medical Appeal (1), a toxic legacy still remains. In addition to the 3000 people that died almost immediately, over the last two and a half decades, there have been a further 20,000 deaths and 120 000 cases of people suffering from health problems, including severe deformities and blindness, as a result of the toxic seepage into the surrounding area from the plant (2).
Since the disaster, survivors have been plagued with an epidemic of cancers, menstrual disorders and what one doctor described as “monstrous births” and victims of the gas attack eke out a perilous existence – 50,000 Bhopalis can’t work due to their injuries and some can’t even muster the strength to move. The lucky survivors have relatives to look after them; many survivors have no family left.
The plant had actually ceased producing pesticides by the time of the explosion, because Union Carbide had realised that there was not sufficient demand for this product in India. The apparent root cause of the accident was that the plant had not been properly maintained following the ceasing of production, although tons of toxic chemicals still remained on the site. More details of how the accident happened can be found at (1) below
It wasn’t until 1989 that Union Carbide, in a partial settlement with the Indian government, agreed to pay out some $470 million in compensation. The victims weren’t consulted in the settlement discussions, and many felt cheated by their compensation -$300-$500 – or about five years’ worth of medical expenses. Today, those who were awarded compensation are hardly better off than those who weren’t.
In 1991, the local government in Bhopal charged Warren Anderson, Union Carbide’s CEO at the time of the disaster, with manslaughter. If tried in India and convicted, he faces a maximum of ten years in prison. But neither the American nor the Indian government seem interested in disturbing him with an extradition,
The Union Carbide Corporation itself was charged with culpable homicide, a criminal charge whose penalty has no upper limit. These charges have never been resolved, as Union Carbide, like its former CEO, has refused to appear before an Indian court.
Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001. Dow says the legal case was resolved in 1989 when Union Carbide settled with the Indian government for 470 million dollars, and that all responsibility for the factory now rests with the government of the state of Madhya Pradesh, which now owns the site.
To this day, despite requests to appear in court from the Indian government, and despite the compensation which itself may well be regarded by some as an admittal of guilt, the company and its CEO have not faced criminal charges and the owner continues to be profitable on the stock market.
In a rather strange bizarre turn of events, following a wave of publicity around the 25 year anniversary of the Bhopaln disaster, 7 Indian executives were recently found guilty in an Indian court, however, these are not the CEO, it is 25 years too late, one is dead, and they are presently released on bail.
Analysis – so what does the ‘Bhopal-Dow chemical suggest about corporate ethics? – How harmful is this?
If we look at the raw number of deaths and injuries, this is the worst industrial accident of all time; and in terms of immediate harm and suffering to people it ranks considerably higher than September the 11th – with a death toll of roughly 3000, so in terms of sheer numbers the amount of harm is huge.
What the eight Indian employees were found guilty of, and what the CEO would also have gone on trial for, is neglect – neglecting to adequately maintain the factory once it was not profitable – and it was this neglect that lead to the explosion that caused the 20 000 deaths and 120 000 illnesses. So the company is directly responsible for immense human suffering because of this neglect.
In addition, Union Carbide also remains liable for the environmental devastation its operations have caused. The contamination that Union Carbide left behind continues to spread. Barrels of toxic chemicals still lie open, and people are still forced to drink poisoned water.
What makes this case worse is the actions of the company after the tragedy, which clearly suggest that the profitability of the company always came before the well being of the individuals harmed – the derisory settlement out of court in 1989 suggesting it was liable, without consulting the victims could be regarded as an effort to put an end to the affair – especially as the company is quoted as having said this is the case.
Then there is the fact that the CEO simply went missing for years afterwards and has failed to stand up for criminal trial.
On final analysis, however, the real problem here is the pursuit of the bottom line – it was increased profit that sent the company to India and it is wishing to avoid compensation for the victims – because they can get away with it in India. This is a classic case of a powerful company shafting the powerless, and it continues to this day.
As a brief aside, However, it is important to note that the company did not set out to kill 20 000 people and one can reasonably assume that Union Carbide did not actually want this to happen. Also, it might be argued that, in terms of motive, Union Carbide are not in the same league as mining companies or damn building companies or even Oil companies who displace people from their land without taking steps to compensate those displaced peoples adequately. One couldn’t have reasonably foretold that this would happen.
Secondly, if you know where your nearest Dow offices are, or if you happen to find out when the next event will be that ‘Dow chemicals’ will be sponsoring or appearing at you might like to try something like this http://www.youtube.com/BhopalMedicalAppeal (and check out the 12 year old – whose made me question my belief to never have children – because if they turn out like him, perhaps reproducing would be worthwhile after all)
Thirdly, you could watch this film and get inspired- http://theyesmenfixtheworld.com/ – which is about two anti-corporate media activists who stick it to immoral corporations with a sense of humour. This part of their web site http://challenge.theyesmen.org/ gives you some ideas of how you can hold Corporations to account and undermine their power.
The three country case studies below all suggest that although neoliberal policies might promote economic development in the long run, in the case of Chile at least, there are some significant negative consequences of this pathway to development.
Chile in the 1970s
Boliva in the the 1990s
India – Contemporary
NB – If you’re here for a blog post about Neoliberalism in India – please click here (I moved it!)
Chile
The following clip from ‘The Shock Doctrine’ outlines the ‘neoliberal experiment in Chile from 1973 onwards, the very first neoliberal experiment in development.
Following the overthrow Salvador Allende, the democratically elected but Socialist President, the American backed Dicator Augusto Pinochet implemented neoliberal economic reforms.
These were written for him by by a group of American economists known as ‘The Chicago school’, headed by Milton Freedman.
Examples of neoliberal policies reforms included the cutting of taxes on imports to 10% (previously Chile had the second most protected economy in the world) and the privatisation of state owned companies.
In the short term – the policies increased unemployment and inflation and inequality and human misery which led to massive social unrest which Pinochet oppressed violently killing tens of thousands of people.
However, 40 years later… Chile is one of Latin America’s leading economies.
Neoliberals might argue tens of thousands of lives is a price worth paying for rapid wealth creation
Neoliberalism in Bolivia
This video clip from ‘The Corporation’ summarizes the case study of water privatization in Bolivia in the 1990s.
In the early 1990s, one local administrative area within Bolivia was forced to privatise the previously state owned water supply as part of a ‘Structural Adjustment Programme’
A Multinational took over running the water supply for a profit
The poorest people couldn’t afford to pay for water.
This led to massive protests which the government violently suppressed.
In this case the government eventually renationalised the water supply due to popular demand.
Did neoliberalism help development?
If you define progress as the right to clean water then no.
If you define it as increasing profit for European Transnationals then yes.
Neoliberalism in India
Arundhati Roy notes that ‘Trickle down hasn’t worked in India, but gush up certainly has’
She notes the following three ways in which the Elite in India Benefit from Neoliberal Policies
Corrupt government officials sign a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ (MoU) with a Corporation which privatises a chunk of publicly owned land, giving that corporation the right to use that land to establish a business – this either takes the form of mining the raw materials from under the land, or establishing a range of other projects such as Agribusinesses, Special Economic Zones, Dams, and even Formula One racing circuits.
Taxes are typically kept very low in these deals – often sow low in that local people see little of the financial benefit of the new business. This is especially true were mining is concerned. In 2005, for example, the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Jharkhand signed hundreds of memorandums of understanding with private corporations, turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore and other minerals for a pittance – royalties (effectively taxes) ranged from 0.5% to 7%, with the companies allowed to keep up to 99% of the revenue gained from these resources. (Allowing people like Ambanni to build their 27 story houses, rather than the money being used for food for the majority of the Indian population.)
In a third strand of Neoliberal policy, companies are subjected to very little regulation. It seems that they are allowed to develop their projects without protecting the environment or paying any compensation to people who are negatively affected by these projects.
Since the 1990s, Equatorial Guinea has become one of the largest oil producing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is now the richest country per capita in Africa. It ranks 43rd in the world for gross domestic product per capita.
America has 1.5 million children of primary-school age out of school
A brief summary of part of Arundhati Roy’s ‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’ – In which she explores some of the consequences of privatisation (part of neoliberalisation) in India.
