Srinivas Tata is Director, Social Development Division, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)
Jaco Cilliers is Head of Asia-Pacific Policy and Programmes
UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub
BANGKOK, Thailand, Aug 30 2019 (IPS) – It’s 1962, and in a modest Hong Kong neighborhood, a poetic love story unfolds. Filmed almost twenty years ago, Wong Kar-wai’s seminal movie In the Mood for Love captured the world’s imagination about lifestyle in the region.
A lower-middle class existence had never looked better. Fast forward to 2018 and a new movie, set in today’s Singapore captures the world’s attention, but for very different reasons.
“Crazy Rich Asians” mixes Asian family values, education and prosperity with a consumeristic facade of jewelry, clothes and luxury travel. The result is entertaining, yet thought-provoking: when did this seismic socio-economic shift take place? When did Asia become so prosperous, yet so unequal?
Increases in income inequality have coincided with a narrower concentration of wealth in the Asia-Pacific region, now home to the greatest number of billionaires in the world. Their combined net worth is seven times the combined GDP of the region’s least developed countries.
Governments have committed to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and aim to fulfill the promise of “leaving no one behind”. Nonetheless, research reveals a worrying trend toward greater inequality, not just in incomes, but also in access to basic services — educational attainment, health, clean energy and basic sanitation.
Gender is, perhaps, the most important lens through which these stark inequalities in access to health, basic services and rights can be understood. And they are most likely to be left behind. In addition, natural disasters, which have become more frequent and intense, disproportionately affect the poorest. Due to their socio-economic plight, their capacity to recover is also seriously weakened.
Putting “Leave no one behind” into practice
Inequalities are not inevitable – they ‘stem from policies, laws, cultural norms, corruption, and other issues that can be addressed.’ To be addressed, they require a range of well-coordinated policy interventions. If left unchecked, inequalities ultimately threaten social cohesion, economic growth and environmental sustainability.
Several countries have prioritized investments in education, health and social protection to achieve more equitable development outcomes. Mongolia, for instance, now allocates 21 per cent of public expenditure toward social protection with a specific focus on children. This has resulted in a significant reduction in stunting.
Bhutan and Thailand have successfully introduced universal health care schemes. Viet Nam decided to boost financing toward education and health sectors, in effect managing or reversing the trend toward greater inequality.
Fiscal measures are equally fundamental in addressing inequality. Tax to GDP ratios are low in a number of countries across the region, especially in South Asia. Progressive taxation remains a critical tool for wealth and income redistribution.
Some countries are taking steps to reform their tax systems while others are finding innovative and creative ways to boost venue and enforce tax collection. In 2016, for instance, Thailand introduced an inheritance tax and China is planning to do so in the coming years.
Labour market policies aimed at improving working conditions, raising the minimum wage, and offering unemployment benefits can act as a buffer to protect the poorer segments of society.
While some countries in the region, especially in Southeast Asia, have raised the minimum wage, more comprehensive measures need to be taken. With the emergence and adoption of new technologies—automation, AI, and machine-learning—many low-skilled jobs and tasks are being eliminated.
Adopting and embracing new technologies would need to be viewed through the broader lens of achieving the SDG and leaving no one behind.
Emerging trends, such as the fourth industrial revolution and climate change have wider cross-border ramifications. Countering the negative impact on inequalities will require collective and coordinated responses at the national, regional and global levels. It is apparent that a range of pro-active actions need to be taken by policymakers in the region to tackle inequality. Business as usual will just not do it this time.
The producers of the comedy blockbuster probably did not intend to stir debate on socio-economic inequalities. Nonetheless, by showing us “Crazy Rich Asians” enjoying their lavish lifestyles, they also managed to hold up a mirror and make us think about the striking contradictions lived everyday by millions.
If the region is to continue to be a growth engine for the world and a centre of global economic dynamism, it will have to show that it is not just a place where billionaires feel at home, but also a region that is charting a more secure and sustainable future for those left behind.
Tarik Gooptu is in his second and final year of the master’s of philosophy in economics at the University of Oxford. Originally from Washington, DC, he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in economics and political science*.
OXFORD, UK, Jul 31 2019 (IPS) – Tackling inequality in the 21st century requires us to understand and address barriers to upward mobility that segments of people face within countries. In a world with high and increasing levels of urbanization, the conversation on challenges to mobility must start with cities.
By addressing the drivers of inequality in cities, policymakers can alleviate conditions that perpetuate within-country inequality. Efficiently planning public transportation investments to target metropolitan communities with low connectivity is a crucial step to reducing disparities in upward mobility.
Doing this provides low-income residents with improved access to jobs, schools, hospitals, and other benefits of living in an urban area. A smart urban planning framework, enabled by effective partnership between the public and private sector, would enable citizens to enjoy a more level playing field.
As a result, cities can transform into drivers of global economic convergence in living standards.
In the past three decades, the world has experienced a global convergence between countries, mainly due to increased international trade, advancements in technology, and economic integration.
However, these same factors have led to a relatively new phase of inequality seen in the 21st century. Works by Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez (2011) and Lakner and Milanovic (2016) have depicted a world suffering from inequality within countries, characterized by disparities between “gainers” and “losers” in the globalized economy.
People have proposed multiple explanations for this, including skill-biased technological change, increased automation, and outsourcing of jobs to regions with cheaper labor—to name a few. Perhaps somewhat overlooked are the large disparities between people living within the cities themselves.
Why cities? Rapid urbanization and severe intracity inequality are the two primary reasons policymakers should focus on cities when thinking about how to tackle the broader issue of inequality.
According to the World Urbanization Report, 55 percent of the global population resides in urban areas—an increase from 30 percent in 1950. The global urbanized population is projected to increase even further, to 68 percent, by 2050 (UN 2018).
In addition, the UN Population Division reports that “urbanization has been faster in some less developed regions compared to historical trends in the more developed regions” (UN DESA 2018. The convergence in the growth of urbanization, between developing and advanced economies, also suggests that the problems of cities increasingly affect countries at all income levels.
In addition to rapid urbanization, cities have become a locus of the most severe inequality we see today. A 2014 article by Kristian Behrens summarizes the issue of inequality within cities.
Behrens shows that within-country Gini indexes are highest as population densities increase and that under current conditions, cities tend to disproportionately reward people in the top income percentiles (Behrens 2014). In addition, cities draw people primarily from the top and bottom of the income distribution.
The global economic restructuring, outlined above, is expected to create more polarized income distribution within countries. This, combined with Behrens’s evidence, suggests that inequality within cities is expected to worsen, under current conditions.
The countries of the world are simultaneously experiencing unprecedented urbanization and severe inequality. While cities are currently the nexus of the worst inequality, there are opportunities to convert them into means for economic convergence.
The concept of “agglomeration economies” is summarized well by Edward Glaeser as the benefits realized from people and firms locating close to one another, in cities and industrial clusters, which are primarily gained through reduced transportation costs (Glaeser 2010).
But some areas in cities are not as well connected as others. This drives disparities between people in metropolitan localities. In order to address this, policymakers must address inequality of access to jobs and services between communities of different income status.
Underinvestment in roads, buses, train lines, and subways can cut off districts within large cities from jobs, education, and services. Higher mobility costs, in the form of longer commute times and lack of affordable transportation, are barriers to the upward mobility of lower-income people in cities.
Local governments and the private sector can work together to improve access to jobs and services by building a better public transportation infrastructure within cities. However, misallocation of both land and public resources worsens conditions for marginalized communities, contributing to intracity inequality.
The 2016 Rio Olympics, which have been heavily criticized for putting the city in an adverse fiscal situation, is as an example of how misallocation of public resources can actually perpetuate inequality in a city. Rio de Janeiro’s bus rapid transit (BRT) system is a designated-lane integrated bus system planned and funded via a public-private partnership.
City officials said that Rio’s BRT was needed to help transport Olympic spectators and will provide long-term rapid and affordable travel for city residents. While Rio’s BRT successfully reduced average transportation costs, its routes served to aggravate inequality between high- and low-income citizens.
An urban planning study conducted by the Fluminese Federal University shows how Rio’s major daily traffic flows run from lower-income neighborhoods (in the north and west) to downtown Rio (South Zone and part of the North Zone), where 60 percent of Rio’s formal employment is concentrated (Johnson 2014).
But, instead of providing lower-income residents access to the city center, the BRT allocates routes to an upper-income residential area. Jobs here are predominantly in the informal sector: not registered with the government, with lower salaries, and without health or other benefits.
Furthermore, the city government cut spending on health and police as a result of going over budget on Olympics expenditures, which worsened the health and safety of the poor.
Rio’s BRT system exemplifies how public infrastructure can be misallocated, without proper planning and an understanding of citizens’ demand for jobs and services. However, when policymakers implement well-planned public infrastructure, it can combat inequality within cities.
Curitiba’s BRT is a well-known example of effective urban planning yielding positive outcomes for city expansion. Planning of the bus line construction was orchestrated by the Institute for Research and Urban Planning of Curitiba in the 1970s.
Funding and implementation were conducted via a public-private-partnership between the Urban Development Agency of Curitiba, and private bus companies that operate the routes. The partnership model allows policymakers to develop creative ways to ease the cost burden of providing public infrastructure.
The result of Curitiba’s plan was a low-cost, fast, and efficient means of transportation, running on green energy, that has operated successfully for 35 years. A diagram from a 2010 World Resources Institute report shows that the integrated transit system provides a means for citizens in all areas of the expanding city to access all parts of it.
However, despite its initial success, even Curitiba’s sustainable transit system faces difficulties. A 2012 CityLab article says that in recent years, the city has failed to integrate its growing suburbs into its BRT system (Halais 2012).
As a result, low-income residents are cut off while upper-income residents switch to cars—an inconvenience for everyone that harms the poor more severely. Curitiba’s example shows that policymakers require a constant and proactive awareness of cities’ changing needs.
With available economic data and the implementation of origin-destination surveys, we can better understand where populations need to be connected and their demands for particular services.
An efficient way to tackle inequality is to address lack of mobility in cities, which drives unequal access to jobs, education, and services. Improving access to public infrastructure allows people of all income levels to benefit from the agglomeration effects of living in an urban area.
Well-planned public transportation systems bring cities closer to this goal through better access for low-income populations to jobs, schools, and hospitals in the city center. Thus, growing cities can serve as sources of economic convergence rather than divergence.
Public transportation not only helps lower inequality, it also helps reduce cities’ carbon footprint. As many megacities begin to suffer the ill effects of heavy pollution, policy that addresses both inequality and sustainability would be welcome.
*Following a global essay competition for graduate students on how best to tackle inequality, Tarik Gooptu’s submission was selected as the runner-up. To learn of future Finance & Development ( F&D) essay competitions, sign up for the newsletter here. F&D is a publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Nippon Foundation President Yohei Sasakawa and Socorro Gross, Pan American Health Organisation representative in Brazil, hold a press conference in Brasilia at the end of a 10-day visit to this country by the Japanese activist who is also World Health Organisation Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
BRASILIA, Jul 11 2019 (IPS) – “The ambulance team refused to take my sick friend to the hospital because he had had Hanseniasis years before,” said Yohei Sasakawa, president of the Nippon Foundation, at one of the meetings held during his Jul. 1-10 visit to Brazil.
His friend was completely cured and had no visible effects of the disease, but in a small town everyone knows everything about their neighbours, he said.
This didn’t happen in a poor country, but in the U.S. state of Texas, only about 20 years ago, Sasakawa pointed out to underline the damage caused by the discrimination suffered by people affected by Hansen’s Disease, better known as leprosy, as well as those who have already been cured, and their families.
“The disease is curable, its social damage is not,” he said during a meeting with lawmaker Helder Salomão, chair of the Human Rights Commission in Brazil’s lower house of Congress, to ask for support in the fight against Hanseniasis, the official medical name for the disease in Brazil, where the use of the term leprosy has been banned because of the stereotypes and stigma surrounding it.
The highlight of the mission of Sasakawa, who is also a World Health Organisation (WHO) Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, was a meeting on Monday Jul. 8 with President Jair Bolsonaro, who posted a message on Facebook during the meeting, which had nearly 700,000 hits as of Thursday Jul. 11.
In the 13-and-a-half minute video, Bolsonaro, Sasakawa, Health Minister Luiz Mandetta and Women, Family and Human Rights Minister Damares Alves issued a call to the authorities, organisations and society as a whole to work together to eradicate the disease caused by the Mycobacterium Leprae bacillus.
A preliminary agreement emerged from the dialogues held by the Japanese activist with members of the different branches of power in Brasilia, to hold a national meeting in 2020 to step up the fight against Hanseniasis and the discrimination and stigma faced by those affected by it and their families.
The idea is a conference with a political dimension, with the participation of national authorities, state governors and mayors, as well as a technical dimension, said Carmelita Ribeiro Coriolano, coordinator of the Health Ministry’s Hanseniasis Programme. The Tokyo-based Nippon Foundation will sponsor the event.
Brazil has the second highest incidence of Hansen’s Disease in the world, with 27,875 new cases in 2017, accounting for 12.75 percent of the world total, according to WHO. Only India has more new cases.
The government established a National Strategy to Combat Hanseniasis, for the period 2019-2022, in line with the global strategy outlined by the WHO in 2016.
Brazilian Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights Damares Alves (L) receives a gift from Yohei Sasakawa, president of the Nippon Foundation, at the beginning of a meeting in Brasilia, in which the minister promised to strengthen assistance to those affected by Hansen’s Disease, including the payment of compensation to patients who were isolated in leprosariums or leper colonies in the past. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
Extensive training of the different actors involved in the treatment of the disease and plans at the state and municipal levels, tailored to local conditions, guide the efforts against Hansen’s Disease, focusing particularly on reducing cases that cause serious physical damage to children and on eliminating stigma and discrimination.
Before his visit to Brasilia, Sasakawa, who has already come to Brazil more than 10 times as part of his mission against Hansen’s Disease, toured the states of Pará and Maranhão to discuss with regional and municipal authorities the obstacles and the advances made, in two of the regions with the highest prevalence rate.
“In Brazil there is no lack of courses and training; the health professionals are sensitive and give special attention to Hanseniasis,” said Faustino Pinto, national coordinator of the Movement for the Reintegration of People Affected by Hanseniasis (MORHAN), who accompanied the Nippon Foundation delegation in Brasilia.
“Promoting early diagnosis, to avoid serious physical damage, and providing better information to the public and physical rehabilitation to ensure a better working life for patients” are the most necessary measures, he told IPS.
Pinto’s case illustrates the shortcomings in the health services. He was not diagnosed as being affected with Hansen’s Disease until the age of 18, nine years after he felt the first symptoms. It took five years of treatment to cure him, and he has serious damage to his hands and joints.
His personal plight and the defence of the rights of the ill, former patients and their families were outlined in his Jun. 27 presentation in Geneva, during a special meeting on the disease, parallel to the 41st session of the Human Rights Council, the highest organ of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Pinto is an eloquent advocate of the use of Hanseniasis or Hansen’s Disease, rather than leprosy, a term historically burdened with religious prejudice and stigma, which aggravates the suffering of patients and their families, but continues to be used by WHO, for example.
Yohei Sasakawa (2nd-L), president of the Nippon Foundation, accompanied by two members of his delegation, took part in a meeting with Congressman Helder Salomão (C), chair of the Human Rights Commission of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, who pledged to support initiatives to eliminate leprosy in his country. Faustino Pinto (2nd-R), national coordinator of the Movement for the Reintegration of Persons Affected by Hanseniasis (MORHAN), also participated. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
Discrimination against people with the disease dates back to biblical times, when it was seen as a punishment from God, said Sasakawa during his meeting with Minister Damares Alves, a Baptist preacher who describes herself as “extremely Christian”.
In India there are 114 laws that discriminate against current or former Hansen’s Disease patients, banning them from public transport or public places, among other “absurdities”, he said.
In India, they argue that these are laws that are no longer applied, which justifies even less that they remain formally in force, he maintained during his meetings in Brasilia to which IPS had access.
Prejudice and misinformation not only subject those affected by the disease to exclusion and unnecessary suffering, but also make it difficult to eradicate the disease by keeping patients from seeking medical care, activists warn.
His over 40-year battle against Hansen’s Disease has led Sasakawa to the conclusion that it is crucial to fight against the stigma which is still rife in society.
He pressed the United Nations General Assembly to adopt in 2010 the Resolution for the Elimination of Discrimination against Persons Affected by Leprosy and their Families.
He said these attitudes and beliefs no longer make sense in the light of science, but persist nonetheless.
Treatment making isolation for patients unnecessary in order to avoid contagion has been available since the 1940s, but forced isolation in leprosariums and leper colonies officially continued in a number of countries for decades.
In Brazil, forced segregation officially lasted until 1976 and in practice until the following decade.
With multi-drug treatment or polychemotherapy, introduced in Brazil in 1982, the cure became faster and more effective.
Information is key to overcoming the problems surrounding this disease, according to Socorro Gross, the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) representative in Brazil who also held meetings with the Nippon Foundation delegation.
“Communication is essential, the media has a decisive role to play” to ward off atavistic fears and to clarify that there is a sure cure for Hansen’s Disease, that it is not very contagious and that it ceases to be so shortly after a patient begins to receive treatment, Gross, a Costa Rican doctor with more than 30 years of experience with PAHO in several Latin American countries, told IPS.
Mario Osava interviews YOHEI SASAKAWA, president of the Nippon Foundation
Yohei Sasakawa, president of the Nippon Foundation, is interviewed by IPS in the Brazilian capital, where he concluded a tour of the country aimed at promoting the elimination of Hansen’s Disease, better known as leprosy, and also the stigma that make it the “disease of silence.” Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
BRASILIA, Jul 10 2019 (IPS) – Yohei Sasakawa has dedicated half of his 80 years of life to combating the “disease of silence” and is still fighting the battle, as president of the Nippon Foundation and World Health Organisation (WHO) goodwill ambassador for elimination of leprosy, formally known as Hansen’s Disease.
His current emphasis is on combating the discrimination, prejudice and stigma that aggravate the suffering of people with leprosy, their families and even those who have already been cured. They also stand in the way of treatment, because people with the disease keep silent out of fear of hostility, he told IPS in an interview in the Brazilian capital.
“I travel around the world and speak out against the discrimination that marginalises those affected by the disease. But these are prejudices that have existed for 2,000 years; they cannot be overcome in two or three years. Many share my viewpoint and accompany me in the struggle. One day the discrimination will end. It is more difficult to cure the disease that plagues society than the illness itself. My effort is to hold a dialogue with presidents and ministers, people in positions of leadership, so that my message acquires political strength and can lead to a solution.”
Sasakawa visited Brazil Jul. 1 to 10, as part of his activism aimed at reducing the prevalence and social impacts of a disease stigmatised since biblical times. In Brasilia, he mobilised President Jair Bolsonaro, legislators and health and human rights officials to promote more intense efforts against the disease.
The idea of holding a national conference on Hansen’s Disease emerged from the meetings, with the political objective of disseminating knowledge and bolstering the disposition to eradicate prejudice, and the technical goal of improving strategies and efforts against the disease.
Brazil is second only to India with respect to the number of new infections diagnosed each year. The country implemented a National Strategy to Combat Hanseniasis from 2019 to 2022, with plans also at the level of municipalities and states, tailored to the specific local conditions.
The Tokyo-based Nippon Foundation is funding several projects and is preparing to support new initiatives in Brazil.
Brazil and Japan abolished the word leprosy from their medical terminology, due to the stigma surrounding it, and adopted the term Hanseniasis to refer to the disease caused by the Mycobacterium leprae bacillus. Sasakawa used this name during his interview with IPS, even though the WHO continues to employ the term leprosy.
IPS: Why did you choose as your mission the fight against Hansen’s Disease and the different kinds of harm it causes to patients and their families?
YOHEI SASAKAWA: It started with my father, the founder of the Nippon Foundation, who as a young man fell in love with a young woman who suddenly disappeared when she was taken far away and put in isolation. My father was appalled by the cruelty and, driven by a spirit of seeking justice, he started this movement. No one discussed the reason she was taken away, but I sincerely believe it was because she had Hanseniasis.
Later my father built hospitals in different places, including one in South Korea, where I accompanied him to the inauguration. On that occasion I noticed that my father touched the hands and legs of the patients, even though they had pus. He hugged them. That impressed me.
I was surprised for two reasons. It frightened me that my father so easily embraced people in those conditions. Besides, I wasn’t familiar with the disease yet. I saw people with a sick, unhealthy pallor. They were dead people who were still alive, the living dead, abandoned by their families.
I was filled with admiration for my father’s work and immediately decided that I should continue it.
IPS: What are the main difficulties in eradicating Hanseniasis?
YS: In general, when faced with a problem specialists and intellectuals come up with 10 reasons why it’s impossible to solve. I have the strong conviction that it is possible, and that’s why I address the problem in such a way that I can identify it and at the same time find a solution.
The people who find it difficult generally work in air-conditioned offices pushing around papers, studying the data. The most important thing is to have the firm conviction that the problem can be solved and then begin to take action.
The president of the Nippon Foundation, Yohei Sasakawa (C) is seen meeting with the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro (L), in an IPS screen capture from the video that the president broadcast on Facebook to raise public awareness about the importance of eliminating Hansen’s Disease, better known as leprosy, and eradicating the prejudice faced by patients and their families. Credit: IPS
Since the 1980s more than 16 million people have been cured of Hansen’s Disease. Today, 200,000 patients a year are cured around the world.
IPS: What role do prejudice, stigma and discrimination play in the fight against this disease?
YS: That is a good question. After working for many years with the WHO, focusing mainly on curing the disease, I realised that many people who had already been cured could neither find work nor get married; they were still suffering the same conditions they faced when they were sick.
I concluded that Hanseniasis was like a two-wheeled motorcycle – the front one is the disease that can be cured and the back one is the prejudice, discrimination and stigma that surround it. If you don’t cure both wheels, no healing is possible.
In 2003, I submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights a proposal to eliminate discrimination against Hanseniasis. After seven years of paperwork and procedures, the 193-member General Assembly unanimously approved a resolution to eradicate this problem that affects the carrier of the disease as well as those who have been cured, and their families.
But this does not mean that the problem has been solved, because prejudice and discrimination are the disease plaguing society.
People believe that Hanseniasis is a punishment from God, a curse, a hereditary evil. It’s hard to eradicate this judgment embedded in people’s minds. Even today there are many patients who have recovered and are totally healed, who cannot find a job or get married. In spite of the new laws, their conditions do not improve, because of the prejudice in people’s hearts.
In Japan, several generations of the family of someone who had the disease were unable to marry. This is no longer the case today.
That’s why I travel the world and speak out against the discrimination that marginalises those affected by the disease. But these are prejudices that have existed for 2,000 years; they cannot be overcome in two or three years.
Many share my viewpoint and accompany me in the struggle. One day the discrimination will end. It is more difficult to cure the disease that plagues society than the illness itself.
My effort is to hold a dialogue with presidents and ministers, people in positions of leadership, so that my message acquires political strength and can lead to a solution.
IPS: How did Japan manage to eradicate Hansen’s Disease?
YS: One way was the collective action of people who had the disease. Long-term media campaigns were conducted to spread knowledge about the disease. Movies, books and plays were also produced.
In Japan, Hanseniasis ceased to be the ‘disease of silence’. The nation apologised for the discrimination and compensated those affected. But in other countries, people affected by the disease have not yet come together to fight. Brazil, however, does have a very active movement.
YS: Morhan really stands out as a model. Organisations have been formed by patients in India and Ethiopia, but they still have limited political influence. The Nippon Foundation encourages such movements.
IPS: You’ve visited Brazil more than 10 times. Have you seen any progress on this tour of the states of Pará and Maranhão, in the north, and in Brasilia?
YS: On that trip we couldn’t visit patients’ homes and talk to them, but we did see that the national, regional and local governments are motivated. We will be able to expand our activities here. In any country, if the highest-level leaders, such as presidents and prime ministers, take the initiative, solutions can be accelerated.
We agreed to organise a national meeting, promoted by the Health Ministry and sponsored by the Nippon Foundation, if possible with the participation of President Jair Bolsonaro, to bolster action against Hanseniasis.
We believe that this would generate a strong current to reduce the prevalence of Hanseniasis to zero and also to eliminate discrimination and prejudice. If this happens, my visit could be considered very successful.
IPS: What would you emphasise about the results of your visit?
YS: The message that President Bolsonaro spread directly to the population through Facebook during our meeting, with his view addressed to all politicians, to his team and and to all government officials on the need to eliminate the disease. I feel as if I have obtained the support of a million people who will work with us.
The principal of the Samo Alto rural school, Omar Santander, shows organic tomatoes in the greenhouse built by teachers, students and their families, who raise the crops irrigated with rainwater or recycled water in Coquimbo, a region of northern Chile where rainfall is scarce. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS
OVALLE, Chile, Jul 4 2019 (IPS) – Children from the neighboring municipalities of Ovalle and Río Hurtado in northern Chile are harvesting rain and recycling greywater in their schools to irrigate fruit trees and vegetable gardens, in an initiative aimed at combating the shortage of water in this semi-arid region.
And other youngsters who are completing their education at a local polytechnic high school built a filter that will optimise the reuse and harvesting of water.
“The care of water has to start with the children,” Alejandra Rodríguez, who has a son who attends the school in Samo Alto, a rural village on the slopes of the Andes Mountains in Río Hurtado, a small municipality of about 4,000 inhabitants in the Coquimbo region, told IPS.
“My son brought me a tomato he harvested, to use the seeds. For them, the harvest is the prize. He planted his garden next to the house and it was very exciting,” said Maritza Vega, a teacher at the school, which has 77 students ranging in age from four to 15.
The principal of the school, Omar Santander, told IPS during a tour of rural schools in the area involved in the project that “the Hurtado River (which gives the municipality its name) was traditionally generous, but today it only has enough water for us to alternate the crops that are irrigated, every few days. People fight over watering rights.”
The Samo Alto school collects rainwater and recycles water after different uses. “The water is then sent to a double filter,” he explained, pointing out that they have a pond that holds 5,000 liters.
The monthly water bill is much lower, but Santander believes that the most important thing “is the awareness it has generated in the children.”
“There used to be water here, and the adults’ habits come from back then. The students help raise awareness in their families. We want the environmental dimension to be a tool for life,” he said.
For Admalén Flores, a 13-year-old student, “the tomatoes you harvest are tastier and better,” while Alexandra Honores, also 13, said “my grandfather now reuses water.”
El Guindo primary school, located 10 kilometers from the city of Ovalle, the municipal seat, in a town known as a hotspot for drug sales, performed poorly in tests until three years ago.
At that time, the principal, Patricio Bórquez, and the science teacher, Gisela Jaime, launched a process of greywater recovery. They also planted trees and native species of plants to adapt to the dry environment of the municipality of 111,000 inhabitants, located about 400 kilometers north of Santiago.
Four students, ages 13 and 14, talk to IPS about how the water reuse project has made them aware of the importance of taking care of water in the semi-arid territory where they live, in a classroom at the rural school of El Guindo, in the municipality of Ovalle, Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS
“The project was born because there was no vegetation,” said the teacher. Today they recover 8,000 litres of water a month. “Teaching care for the environment provides a life skill,” said Bórquez.
“Our school had the stigma of being in a place rife with drug addiction. Today in Ovalle we are known as the school with the most programs. We placed third in science,” she said.
Jaime described the experience as “gratifying” because it has offered “tools to grow and create awareness among children and the entire community about the importance of caring for water and other resources.”
Geographer Nicolás Schneider, founder of the “Un Alto en el Desierto” Foundation, told IPS that his non-governmental organisation estimates that one million litres of greywater have been recovered after eight years of work with rural schools in Ovalle.
In this arid municipality with variable rainfall, “only 37.6 mm of rainwater fell in 2018 – well below the normal average for the 1981-2010 period of 105.9 mm,” Catalina Cortés, an expert with Chile’s meteorology institute, told IPS from Santiago.
Schneider describes the water situation as critical in the Coquimbo region, which is on the southern border of the Atacama Desert and where 90 percent of the territory is eroded and degraded.
“Due to climate change, it is raining less and less and when it does, the rainfall is very concentrated. Both the lack of rain and the concentration of rainfall cause serious damage to the local population,” she said.
Innovative recycling filter
With guidance from their teachers, students at the Ovalle polytechnic high school built a filtration system devised by Eduardo Leiva, a professor of chemistry and pharmacy at the Catholic University. The filter seeks to raise the technical standard with which greywater is purified.
Duan Urqueta, 17, a fourth-year electronics student at the Ovalle polytechnic high school, describes the award-winning greywater filter he helped to build. Initially, units will be installed in eight rural schools in this municipality in northern Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS
The prototype recycles the greywater from the bathrooms used by the 1,200 students at the polytechnic high school. This water is used to irrigate three areas with 48 different species of trees. Similar filters will be installed in eight rural schools in Ovalle.
The quality of the recovered water will improve due to the filter built thanks to a project by the Innovation Fund for Competitiveness of the regional government of Coquimbo, with the participation of the Catholic University, the “Un Alto en el Desierto” Foundation, and the Ovalle polytechnic high school.
The prototype was built by 18 students and eight teachers of mechanics, industrial assembly, electronics, electricity and technical drawing, and includes two 1,000-litre ponds.
The primary pond holds water piped from the bathroom sinks by gravity which is then pumped to a filter consisting of three columns measuring 0.35 meters high and 0.40 meters in diameter.
“The filter material in each column…can be activated charcoal, sand or gravel,” said Hernán Toro, the head teacher of industrial assembly.
Toro told IPS that “the prototype has a column with zeolite and two columns of activated charcoal. The columns are mounted on a metal structure 2.60 meters high.”
View of the water cleaning filter designed at the Ovalle polytechnic high school and built by a group of teachers and students with funding from the government of the region of Coquimbo, in northern Chile. Each unit costs 2,170 dollars and it will promote water recycling in the schools in the semi-arid municipality. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS
The water is pumped from the pond to the filter’s highest column, passes through the filter material and by gravity runs sequentially through the other columns. Finally, the water is piped into the secondary pond and by means of another electric pump it reaches the irrigation system.
Duan Urqueta, a 17-year-old electronics student, told IPS that they took soil and water samples in seven towns in Ovalle and “we used the worst water to test the filter that is made here at the high school with recyclable materials.”
In 2018, “we won first place with the filter at the Science Fair in La Serena, the capital of the region of Coquimbo,” he said proudly.
Pablo Cortés, a 17-year-old student of industrial assembly, said the project “changed me as a person.”
Toro said the experience “has been enriching and has had a strong social impact. We are sowing the seeds of ecological awareness in the students.”
“It’s a programme that offers learning, service, and assistance to the community. Everyone learns. We have seen people moved to the point of tears in their local communities,” the teacher said.
Now they are going to include solar panels in the project, which will cut energy costs, while they already have an automation system to discharge water, which legally can only be stored for a short time.
Eight schools, including the ones in Samo Alto and El Guindo, are waiting for the new filters, which cost 2,170 dollars per unit.
Schneider believes, however, that at the macro level “water recycling is insufficient” to combat the lack of water in this semi-arid zone. And he goes further, saying “there is an absence of instruments for territorial planning or management of watersheds.”
“Under the current water regulatory framework, the export agribusiness, mainly of fruit, has taken over the valleys, concentrating water use…and the government turns a blind eye,” he complained.
CHRIS WELLISZ is on the staff of Finance & Development published by the International Monetary Fund*
Credit: IMF
WASHINGTON DC, May 24 2019 (IPS) – As a child growing up in Communist Yugoslavia, Branko Milanovic witnessed the protests of 1968, when students occupied the campus of the University of Belgrade and hoisted banners reading “Down with the Red bourgeoisie!”
Milanovic, who now teaches economics at the City University of New York, recalls wondering whether his own family belonged to that maligned group. His father was a government official, and unlike many Yugoslav kids at the time, Milanovic had his very own bedroom—a sign of privilege in a nominally classless society. Mostly he remembers a sense of excitement as he and his friends loitered around the edge of the campus that summer, watching the students sporting red Karl Marx badges.
“I think that the social and political aspects of the protests became clearer to me later,” Milanovic says in an interview. Even so, “1968 was, in many ways, a watershed year” in an intellectual journey that has seen him emerge as a leading scholar of inequality. Decades before it became a fashion in economics, inequality would be the subject of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Belgrade.
Today, Milanovic is best known for a breakthrough study of global income inequality from 1988 to 2008, roughly spanning the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall—which spelled the beginning of the end of Communism in Europe—to the global financial crisis.
The 2013 article, co-written with Christoph Lakner, delineated what became known as the “elephant curve” because of its shape (see chart). It shows that over the 20 years that Milanovic calls the period of “high globalization,” huge increases in wealth were unevenly distributed across the world.
The middle classes in developing economies—mainly in Asia—enjoyed a dramatic increase in incomes. So did the top 1 percent of earners worldwide, or the “global plutocrats.”
Meanwhile, the lower middle classes in advanced economies saw their earnings stagnate.
The elephant curve’s power lies in its simplicity. It elegantly summarizes the source of so much middle-class discontent in advanced economies, discontent that has turbocharged the careers of populists from both extremes of the political spectrum and spurred calls for trade barriers and limits on immigration.
“Branko had a deep influence on global inequality research, particularly with his findings on the elephant curve, which has set the tone for future research,” says Thomas Piketty, author of the bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Piketty and his collaborators confirmed the findings in a 2018 study, which found that the top 1 percent globally captured twice as much of total growth as the bottom 50 percent from 1980 to 2016.
Milanovic’s findings “appear to be even more spectacular than what was initially suggested,” Piketty says. “The elephant looks more like a mammoth.”
Economists long disdained the study of inequality. Many lived in a theoretical world populated by a mythical figure known as homo economicus, or rational man, whose only attribute was a drive to maximize his well-being. Differences among people, or groups, were irrelevant. Variety was irrelevant. Only averages mattered.
In this world of identical rational actors, the forces of supply and demand worked their magic to determine prices and quantities of goods, capital, and labor in a way that maximized welfare for society as a whole. The distribution of wealth or income didn’t fit into the picture. It was simply a by-product of market forces.
“The market solves everything,” Milanovic says. “So the topic really was not—still is not—totally mainstream.”
Then came the global financial crisis of 2008, and with it “the rise of the realization that the top 1 percent or the top 5 percent have really vastly outstripped, in income growth, the middle class,” he says.
The study of inequality also got a boost from the explosion of data that can be mined with evermore powerful computers, making it easier to divide the anonymous masses of consumers and workers into groups with common characteristics. Big data, he says, “enables the study of heterogeneity, and inequality is by definition heterogenous.”
Data has always been one of Milanovic’s passions, alongside his interest in social classes, which flourished during his high school years in Brussels, where his economist father was posted as Yugoslav envoy to the then–European Economic Community.
“High school in Belgium—and I think it was the same in France—was very Marxist,” he says.
His classmates were divided between leftist kids, influenced by the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and “bourgeois” kids. As the privileged son of a diplomat representing an ostensibly workers’ government, young Branko didn’t quite fit either category. “It was a very peculiar situation,” he says.
At university in Belgrade, Milanovic initially leaned toward philosophy but decided economics would be more practical. It also offered a way to combine his interests in statistics and social classes.
Graduate studies led to a fellowship at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he was impressed by American abundance—huge portions of inexpensive food, free refills of coffee, big cars—alongside stark income inequality and racial discrimination.
Two years later, he was back in Belgrade to work on his doctoral dissertation on inequality in Yugoslavia, mining rare household survey data supplied by a friend who worked in the federal statistical office.
While his dissertation raised eyebrows in Marxist Yugoslavia—along with his decision to avoid joining the Communist Party—it launched a two-decade career at the World Bank’s Research Department.
“Branko was really one of the leading experts, even at that time, on income distribution,” says Alan Gelb, who hired Milanovic to join a small team studying the transition to market economies in post-Communist eastern Europe. Milanovic focused on issues of poverty and income distribution.
The wealth of data the World Bank collects was a priceless resource, and it inspired Milanovic to carry out cross-country comparisons of inequality, which were a novelty. One day in 1995, Milanovic was talking with Gelb’s successor as the head of his unit.
“I suddenly had this idea: ‘Look, we have all this data from around the world. We study individual countries, but we never put them together.’ ” Four years later, he published the first study of global income distribution based on household surveys.
In the years that followed, Milanovic published widely and profusely. Alongside his work on post-Communist economies, he continued to explore inequality and its link with globalization. His articles and books display the broad range of his interests, which include history, literature, and sports.
In one article, he estimates the average income and inequality level in Byzantium in the year 1000. Another looks at the links between labor mobility and inequality in soccer, which he calls the most globalized sport.
He found that club soccer has become very unequal because a dozen top European teams can afford to recruit the world’s best players. On the other hand, the free movement of soccer players has reduced inequality among national teams. The reason: players from small countries can hone their skills at top club teams, then return home to compete for their national teams.
Literary conversations with his wife, Michele de Nevers, a specialist in climate finance at the Center for Global Development, inspired him to write an offbeat analysis of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Arguing that the book is as much about money as love, he estimates the incomes of various characters and looks at how wealth influences the choice of mates for Austen’s protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet.
He did the same for Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Both essays were published in Milanovic’s 2011 book, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality .
Another book, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, was a milestone that synthesized years of his scholarship on inequality within and among countries since the Industrial Revolution.
In contrast to Piketty, who argues that inequality inexorably widens under capitalism, Milanovic sees it moving in waves or cycles under the influence of what he calls benign and malign forces.
In advanced economies, income disparity widened in the 19th and early 20th centuries until the malign forces of war and hyperinflation reduced it by destroying wealth. After World War II, benign forces such as progressive taxation, more powerful labor unions, and more widely accessible education pushed inequality down.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a watershed. It brought the former Soviet bloc states into the global economy at a time when China also began opening up. Rapid growth in the developing world narrowed inequality between countries while widening it in the developed world, where middle-class incomes stagnated as the wealthy prospered.
What does the future hold? It looks good for much of the developing world and especially Asia, which will continue to catch up with the rich countries. In advanced economies, on the other hand, the outlook seems grimmer.
There, the twin forces of globalization and technological innovation will continue to squeeze the middle class. Social mobility will decline as an entrenched elite benefits from greater access to expensive higher education and wields its political clout to enact “pro-rich” policies, such as favorable tax regimes.
As income disparities grow, so will social tensions and political strife—a prognosis confirmed by events such as Brexit and protests in France that have occurred since the book’s publication in 2016.
Milanovic worries that this friction might lead to a “decoupling” of democracy and capitalism, resulting in plutocracy in the United States and populism or nativism in Europe.
While there has been considerable debate about inequality over the past decade, “nothing has really moved” in policy terms, he says. “We are on this automatic pilot which basically leads to higher inequality. But I am not totally losing faith.”
The traditional answer—redistribution of income—won’t work as well as it did in the past because of the mobility of capital, which allows the wealthy to shelter their incomes in tax havens. Instead, policy should aim for a redistribution of “endowments” such as wealth and education.
Measures would include higher inheritance taxes, policies that encourage companies to distribute shares to workers, and increased state funding for education.
“We cannot achieve that tomorrow,” he says. “But I think we should have an idea that we want to move to a capitalist world where endowments would be much more equally distributed than today.”
Milanovic also takes on the nettlesome issue of inequality between countries. He calculates that an American, simply by virtue of being born in the United States, will earn 93 times more than a person born in the world’s poorest country.
This is what Milanovic calls the “citizenship premium,” and it gives rise to pressure for migration as people born in poor countries seek their fortunes in richer ones.
Milanovic argues that halting migration is no more feasible than halting the movement of goods or capital. Yet it’s also unrealistic to expect citizens of advanced economies to open their borders. His solution: allow more immigrants but deny them the full rights of citizenship, and perhaps tax them to compensate citizens displaced in the labor force.
His current work, in a way, brings him back to his roots in Yugoslavia. It involves the study of class structure in the People’s Republic of China and, in particular, a close look at the top 5 percent of the income distribution. It forms a part of his next book, Capitalism, Alone, which argues that China has developed a distinct form of capitalism that will coexist with its liberal forebear.
Where is the study of inequality headed? Milanovic sees two frontiers, both driven by the availability of new data. One is wealth inequality, à la Piketty; the other is intergenerational inequality, a subject plumbed by economists such as Harvard’s Raj Chetty.
The two areas “appeal to young people who are now very socially aware,’’ he says. “On the other hand, they are very smart and want to work on tough topics.” He adds, “I am very optimistic in that sense.”
*Opinions expressed in articles and other materials are those of the authors; they do not necessarily reflect IMF policy.
Meanwhile, the lower middle classes in advanced economies saw their earnings stagnate.
