THE WIDENING GAP BETWEEN 'HAVES' AND 'HAVE-NOTS'

World's Haves, Have-Nots Drift Even Further Apart

Every year the United Nations issues a Human Development Report that ranks
the quality of life for the world's nearly 6 billion people.

It looks not only at incomes but other factors such as health, longevity,
literacy and overall well-being.

The United States ranks a respectable third out of 174 countries. But
before we get too complacent, some sobering facts: While we are richer than
Canadians and Norwegians, their quality of life is better than ours. And 20
percent of Americans still live below the poverty line.

Our biggest export is not aircraft or cars but entertainment. So if you
aren't making movies or music, your job insecurity is likely to increase as
a result of corporate downsizing and economic restructuring.

The U.N. Development Program, which authored the report, acknowledges that
most countries showed a significant improvement in lifestyle, even those
that suffered economic reverses such as Asia's financial crash.

But only 33 countries achieved 3 percent annual economic growth while 59 --
mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union --
saw their incomes and lifestyles decline.

Of 36 countries with the least desirable standard of living, 29 are in
Africa and Sierra Leone is dead last. The report blames HIV/AIDS in eastern
and southern Africa and economic stagnation throughout the entire continent
south of the Sahara, primarily because of a crippling debt burden and lack
of foreign investment.

Although it's not just about money, the report clearly shows the rich are
getting richer and the poor poorer. The UNDP blames uncaring,
market-oriented globalization for creating a "grotesque" and dangerous
polarization between the haves and have-nots.

More sobering facts:

- - One-fifth of the world's population living in the highest income
countries has 86 percent of the world's gross domestic product, 82 percent
of world export markets, 68 percent of direct foreign investment and 74
percent of the world's telephone lines. The bottom fifth, in the world's
poorest countries, has about one percent in each sector.

- - The 200 richest people in the world more than doubled their net worth in
the four years before 1998 to $1 trillion.

- - The income gap between the richest fifth and the poorest fifth, measured
in average per capita earnings, widened from 30-to-1 in 1960 to 74-to-1 in
1997.

- - Industrialized countries hold 97 percent of all patents.

- - Organized crime syndicates gross an estimated $1.5 trillion a year.

- - The value of the illegal drug trade in 1995 was estimated at $400
billion; about 8 percent of world trade, more than the shares of iron and
steel or motor vehicles, and roughly the same as textiles gas and oil.

- - The Asian financial crisis will have reduced global output by an
estimated $2 trillion between 1998 and 2000, putting millions of people out
of work and prompting cutbacks in social services all over the world.

- - Foreign investment reached $400 billion in 1997 but 58 percent went to
industrialized countries that need it least. Most of the remaining 42
percent went to China, while Eastern Europe and Africa were largely ignored.

- - Tanzania's debt service payments are nine times what it spends on health
care and four times what it spends on primary education.

The emphasis on markets and profitability has made the global economy
uncaring, says the UNDP. And breakthroughs in technology, such as the
Internet, give the "wired" rich an overwhelming advantage over the
unconnected poor, "whose voices and concerns are being left out of the
global conversation."

Eighty-eight percent of computer owners live in industrialized nations that
represent just 17 percent of the world's population. Eighty percent of
their web sites are in English, although fewer than one in 10 people speak
the language.

"The world is rushing headlong into greater integration, driven mostly by a
philosophy of market profitability and economic efficiency. We must bring
human development and social protection into the equation," said Dr.
Richard Jolly, coordinator of the UNDP report. "Globalization needs a human
face."