A grande convergência

Igualdade global e seus descontentes

BRANKO MILANOVIC

BRANKO MILANOVIC é pesquisador sênior do Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality do CUNY Graduate Center e autor do livro Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War, com lançamento previsto.

Foreing Affairs

Chris Gash

Vivemos numa era de desigualdade — ou pelo menos é o que nos dizem frequentemente. Em todo o mundo, mas especialmente nas economias ricas do Ocidente, o fosso entre os ricos e o resto da população tem aumentado ano após ano, tornando-se um abismo que espalha ansiedade, alimenta o ressentimento e agita a política. A desigualdade é apontada como a culpada por tudo, desde a ascensão do ex-presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, e o voto do Brexit no Reino Unido, até o movimento dos "coletes amarelos" na França e os recentes protestos de aposentados na China, país com uma das maiores taxas de desigualdade de renda do mundo. A globalização, argumenta-se, pode ter enriquecido certas elites, mas prejudicou muitas outras pessoas, devastando antigos centros industriais e tornando-as suscetíveis à política populista.

Há muita verdade nessas narrativas — se analisarmos cada país individualmente. Mas, ao ampliarmos a perspectiva para além do Estado-nação, para o mundo inteiro, o panorama muda. Nessa escala, a história da desigualdade no século XXI é inversa: o mundo está se tornando mais igualitário do que nos últimos 100 anos.

O termo “desigualdade global” refere-se à disparidade de renda entre todos os cidadãos do mundo em um dado momento, ajustada pelas diferenças de preços entre os países. Ela é comumente medida pelo coeficiente de Gini, que varia de zero, um caso hipotético de igualdade total em que todas as pessoas ganham a mesma quantia, a 100, outro caso hipotético em que um único indivíduo detém toda a renda. Graças ao trabalho empírico de muitos pesquisadores, os economistas podem traçar os contornos gerais da mudança na desigualdade global estimada ao longo dos últimos dois séculos.

Do advento da Revolução Industrial, no início do século XIX, até meados do século XX, a desigualdade global aumentou à medida que a riqueza se concentrou nos países industrializados ocidentais. Ela atingiu seu ápice durante a Guerra Fria, quando o mundo era comumente dividido em “Primeiro Mundo”, “Segundo Mundo” e “Terceiro Mundo”, denotando três níveis de desenvolvimento econômico. Mas então, há cerca de 20 anos, a desigualdade global começou a diminuir, em grande parte graças à ascensão econômica da China, que até recentemente era o país mais populoso do mundo. A desigualdade global atingiu seu pico no índice de Gini, de 69,4, em 1988. Caiu para 60,1 em 2018, um nível não visto desde o final do século XIX.

O progresso rumo a uma maior igualdade global não é inevitável. A China agora está rica demais para contribuir significativamente para a redução da desigualdade global, e grandes países como a Índia podem não crescer o suficiente para ter o mesmo impacto que a China teve. Muito dependerá do desempenho dos países africanos; o continente pode impulsionar a próxima grande redução da pobreza e da desigualdade globais. Mas mesmo que a desigualdade global diminua, isso não significa que a turbulência social e política em cada país irá diminuir — pelo contrário, é provável que ocorra o oposto. Devido às vastas diferenças nos salários globais, os ocidentais pobres estiveram, durante décadas, entre as pessoas com maior renda do mundo. Isso não acontecerá mais, pois pessoas de fora do Ocidente, com renda crescente, irão desbancar os ocidentais pobres e de classe média de suas posições privilegiadas. Tal mudança acentuará a polarização nos países ricos, entre aqueles que são ricos segundo os padrões globais e aqueles que não o são.

AS TRÊS ERAS DA DESIGUALDADE

A primeira era da desigualdade global estende-se aproximadamente de 1820 a 1950, um período caracterizado pelo aumento constante da desigualdade. Por volta da época da Revolução Industrial (aproximadamente 1820), a desigualdade global era bastante modesta. O PIB do país mais rico (o Reino Unido) era cinco vezes maior que o do país mais pobre (Nepal) em 1820. (A proporção equivalente entre os PIBs dos países mais ricos e mais pobres hoje é superior a 100 para 1.) Um índice de Gini geral de 50 em 1820 é típico de países muito desiguais hoje, como o Brasil e a Colômbia, mas, considerando o mundo em geral, esse nível de desigualdade é, na verdade, bastante baixo. (Para contextualizar, os Estados Unidos têm atualmente um índice de Gini de 41, enquanto a Dinamarca, uma social-democracia que se orgulha do seu igualitarismo, tem um índice de 27.)

O crescimento da desigualdade global durante o século XIX e a primeira metade do século XX foi impulsionado tanto pelo aumento das disparidades entre os países (medidas pelas diferenças nos seus PIBs per capita) quanto pelo aumento das desigualdades dentro dos países (medidas pelas diferenças nos rendimentos dos cidadãos em um determinado país). As diferenças entre países refletiram o que os historiadores econômicos chamam de Grande Divergência, a crescente disparidade entre, por um lado, os países industrializados da Europa Ocidental, América do Norte e, mais tarde, Japão, e, por outro lado, a China, a Índia, o subcontinente africano, o Oriente Médio e a América Latina, onde os rendimentos per capita estagnaram ou mesmo diminuíram. Essa divergência econômica teve um corolário político e militar, com a ascensão de estados imperiais deixando para trás os estados moribundos ou conquistados. Este período coincidiu com a conquista europeia da maior parte da África, a colonização da Índia e do Sudeste Asiático e a colonização parcial da China.

A segunda era estende-se pela segunda metade do século XX. Caracterizou-se por uma desigualdade global muito elevada, oscilando entre 67 e 70 pontos no índice de Gini. A desigualdade entre países era extremamente alta: em 1952, por exemplo, os Estados Unidos ostentavam um PIB per capita 15 vezes superior ao da China; com 6% da população mundial, os Estados Unidos produziam 40% da produção global. A desigualdade dentro dos países, contudo, estava diminuindo em quase todos os lugares. Diminuiu nos Estados Unidos à medida que o ensino superior se tornou mais abrangente e acessível às classes médias e os rudimentos de um estado de bem-estar social emergiram; diminuiu na China comunista com a nacionalização de grandes propriedades privadas na década de 1950 e, posteriormente, com o igualitarismo compulsivo da Revolução Cultural; e diminuiu na União Soviética à medida que as reformas do líder soviético Nikita Khrushchev reduziram os salários e benefícios excessivamente altos da nomenklatura stalinista. A segunda metade do século XX — a época de maior desigualdade global — foi também a época dos “Três Mundos”: o Primeiro Mundo, de países capitalistas ricos, principalmente na Europa Ocidental e na América do Norte; o Segundo Mundo, de países socialistas um pouco mais pobres, incluindo a União Soviética e a Europa Oriental; e o Terceiro Mundo, de países pobres, a maioria na África e na Ásia, muitos dos quais emergindo recentemente da colonização. Os países da América Latina são frequentemente incluídos neste último grupo, embora, em média, fossem mais ricos do que outros países do Terceiro Mundo e tivessem desfrutado de independência desde o início do século XIX.

Essa era continuou na década seguinte ao fim da Guerra Fria, mas deu lugar a uma nova fase na virada do século XXI. A desigualdade global começou a diminuir há cerca de duas décadas e continua a diminuir até hoje. Caiu de 70 pontos de Gini por volta do ano 2000 para 60 pontos de Gini duas décadas depois. Essa diminuição da desigualdade global, ocorrida no curto período de 20 anos, é mais acentuada do que o aumento da desigualdade global durante o século XIX. A diminuição é impulsionada pela ascensão da Ásia, particularmente da China. O país deu uma contribuição enorme para a redução da desigualdade global por uma série de razões: sua economia partiu de uma base baixa e, portanto, pôde crescer a uma taxa espetacular por duas gerações, e, em virtude da população do país, o crescimento atingiu entre um quarto e um quinto de toda a população mundial.

Tanto pela sua grande população quanto pela sua relativa pobreza, a Índia, o país mais populoso do mundo, poderia desempenhar um papel semelhante ao da China nos últimos 20 anos. Se mais indianos enriquecerem nas próximas décadas, contribuirão para a redução da desigualdade global. Muitas incertezas pairam sobre o futuro da economia indiana, mas seus ganhos nas últimas décadas são indiscutíveis. Na década de 1970, a participação da Índia no PIB global era inferior a 3%, enquanto a da Alemanha, uma grande potência industrial, era de 7%. Em 2021, essas proporções se inverteram.

Mas, mesmo com a queda da desigualdade global desde a virada do século, ela aumentou em muitos países grandes, incluindo China, Índia, Rússia, Estados Unidos e até mesmo nos estados de bem-estar social da Europa continental. Apenas a América Latina contrariou essa tendência, reduzindo sua alta desigualdade por meio de amplos programas redistributivos na Bolívia, no Brasil, no México e em outros países. A terceira era espelha a primeira: testemunhou o aumento da renda em uma parte do mundo e seu declínio relativo em outra. Na primeira era, houve a industrialização do Ocidente e a concomitante desindustrialização da Índia (então sob o domínio britânico, que reprimiu as indústrias locais); na terceira, houve a industrialização da China e, em certa medida, a desindustrialização do Ocidente. Mas a era atual apresentou o efeito oposto sobre a desigualdade global. No século XIX, a ascensão do Ocidente levou ao aumento das desigualdades entre os países. No período mais recente, a ascensão da Ásia levou a uma redução da desigualdade global. O primeiro período foi de divergência; o período atual é de convergência.

N

OT SO LONELY AT THE TOP

Drill down to the level of a single person, and what becomes apparent is probably the greatest reshuffling of individual positions on the global income ladder since the Industrial Revolution. Of course, people tend to care about their status in relation to those around them, not necessarily with respect to others far away, whom they will rarely meet. But slipping in the global income rankings does have real costs. Many globally priced goods and experiences may become increasingly unavailable to middle-class people in the West: for example, the ability to attend international sporting or art events, vacation in exotic locations, buy the newest smartphone, or watch a new TV series may all become financially out of reach. A German worker may have to substitute a four-week vacation in Thailand with a shorter one in another, perhaps less attractive location. A hard-pressed Italian owner of an apartment in Venice may not be able to enjoy it because he needs to rent it out year-round to supplement his income.

People in the lower-income groups of rich countries have historically ranked high in the global income distribution. But they are now being overtaken, in terms of their incomes, by people in Asia. China’s rapid growth has reshaped all aspects of the global income distribution, but the change is most pronounced around the middle and upper-middle of the global rankings, the part typically full of working-class people in Western countries. Higher up, in the top five percent of income earners in the world, Chinese growth has made less of an impact because not enough Chinese have become so rich as to displace the richest Westerners, in particular Americans, who have historically dominated the very top of the global income pyramid in the past 150 to 200 years.

The graph below, which demonstrates how global income rankings have changed for people in different countries, shows the positions of Chinese urban deciles (each decile is composed of ten percent of that country’s population, ranked from the poorest to the richest) compared with Italian deciles in 1988 and 2018. I use data for Chinese city dwellers because China conducts separate household surveys for urban and rural areas and because China’s urban population (now over 900 million people) is much more strongly integrated with the rest of the world than its rural population. Urban Chinese moved up between 24 and 29 global percentiles, meaning that people in a given Chinese urban decile leapfrogged over one-fourth or more of the world’s population in just 30 years. For example, in 1988, a person with the median urban Chinese income would have ranked around the 45th income percentile globally. By 2018, such a person would have advanced to the 70th percentile. This is no surprise in light of the extraordinarily high per capita GDP growth rate in China over that period—an average of around eight percent per year. But the growing standing of Chinese earners has resulted in the relative decline of those in other countries.

Italy provides the clearest example of this effect. Between 1988 and 2018, average Italians in the country’s bottom decile have seen their global ranking slide by 20 percentiles. The second and the third lowest Italian deciles have fallen globally by six and two percentiles, respectively. The global position of wealthy Italians, meanwhile, has barely been affected by the rise of China: wealthier Italians, it turns out, tend to sit above the part of the global distribution where Chinese growth has wrought tremendous change. The changes observed in Italy are not unique to that country. The average German in his country’s poorest income decile has slipped from the 81st percentile globally in 1993 to the 75th percentile in 2018. In the United States, the average person in the poorest decile has moved down between 1988 and 2018 from the 74th to the 67th global percentile. But rich Germans and Americans have remained where they were before: at the top.

The data reveal a striking story, one that is hard to detect when looking only at national studies of inequality: Western countries are increasingly composed of people who belong to very different parts of the global income distribution. Different global income positions correspond to different consumption patterns, and these patterns are influenced by global fashions. As a result, the sense of widening inequality in Western countries may become acute as their populations increasingly belong, measured by income levels, to very different parts of a global income hierarchy. The social polarization that would ensue would make Western societies resemble those of many Latin American countries, where gulfs in wealth and lifestyle are incredibly pronounced.

Unlike the middle of the global income distribution, the composition of the top has remained much the same over the previous three decades: dominated by Westerners. In 1988, 207 million people made up the top five percent of earners in the world; in 2018, that number was 330 million, reflecting both the increase in the world population and the broadening of available data. They represent a group of people that can be called the “globally affluent,” sitting a rung beneath the more rarefied global top one percent.

Americans make up the plurality of this group. In both 1988 and 2018, over 40 percent of the globally affluent were U.S. citizens. British, Japanese, and German citizens come next. Overall, Westerners (including Japan) account for almost 80 percent of the group. Urban Chinese broke into the globally affluent only more recently. Their share has gone up from 1.6 percent in 2008 to 5.0 percent in 2018.

From Asian countries (excluding Japan), only urban Chinese really register among that group. The shares of urban Indians and Indonesians in the global top five percent were insignificant in 1988. These numbers rose only a little between 2008 and 2018: in the case of India, from 1.3 to 1.5 percent; Indonesia, from 0.3 to 0.5 percent. These proportions remain small. The same is true of people in other parts of the world, including Africa, Latin America, and eastern Europe, that, with the exception of people from Brazil and Russia, never had a significant participation among the globally affluent. The top of the global income distribution thus remains dominated by Westerners, especially by Americans. But if the gap in growth rates between East Asia, especially China, and the West persists, the national composition of the globally affluent will change, too. That change is indicative of the evolving balance of economic and political power in the world. What these individual-level data show is, as in the past, the rise of some powers and the relative decline of others.

CATCHING UP

The future direction of global inequality is hard to predict. Three external shocks make the current period unlike any that preceded it: the COVID-19 pandemic, which slashed countries’ growth rates (India’s, for instance, was negative eight percent in 2020); the deterioration of U.S.-Chinese relations, which, given that the United States and China account for over a third of global GDP, will invariably affect global inequality; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has raised food and energy prices around the world and shaken the global economy.

These shocks and their uncertain legacies make forecasting the future of global inequality an unenviable task for economists. Yet certain developments seem likely. For one, China’s increased wealth will limit its ability to lower global inequality, and its upper-middle and upper classes will start entering in great numbers the top of the global income distribution. The increased incomes of other Asians, from countries such as India and Indonesia, will have a similar effect.

At some point in the coming decades, the shares of Chinese and
American populations among the globally affluent might become
approximately the same—that is, there may be as many wealthy people in China by global standards as there are in the United States. Such a development is important because it would reflect a wider shift of economic, technological, and even cultural power in the world.

The world is the most equal it has been in over a century.

To determine exactly when this could happen requires a fairly complicated calculation based on many assumptions, including about the future growth rates of the two economies, changes in internal income distributions, demographic trends, and the ongoing urbanization of China. But the most important factor in determining when the number of globally affluent Chinese people will equal the number of globally affluent Americans is the difference in GDP per capita growth rates between a more rapidly expanding China and the United States. That difference (known as “the growth gap”) was six percentage points in the 1980s and seven percentage points in the 1990s but rose to nine percentage points in the period between China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the global financial crisis in 2008. The difference has since decreased to about four and a half percentage points. That gap might shrink further to between two and four percentage points, as Chinese growth will likely decelerate in the coming years. Likewise, the population growth rates of the two countries may not differ much even if the United States currently boasts a slightly higher rate than China’s.

With all that in mind, it is possible to estimate when the absolute number of Chinese people who earn incomes equal to or higher than the U.S. median income will match the absolute number of such Americans. (The latter are, by definition, one-half of the U.S. population.) At present, just under 40 million Chinese people fulfill that condition (as opposed to about 165 million Americans). But with a growth gap of around three percent per year, in 20 years the two groups would be of equal size; if the growth gap is smaller (say, only two percent per year), parity would be achieved a decade later.

A generation or a generation and a half from now is less than the time that has elapsed from the opening of China in the 1980s to the present. China is tantalizingly close to something that no one would have predicted when Mao died in 1976: that in 70 years, the then impoverished country would have as many rich citizens as does the United States.

THE AFRICAN ENGINE

As a result of this dramatic transformation, China will no longer contribute to the decline in global inequality. African countries, however, may drive its future reduction. African countries need to grow faster than the rest of the world, especially faster than the rich countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and China, to achieve that goal. They play a crucial role here not only because they are mostly poor but also because as birthrates are dropping below replacement levels around the world, Africa’s population is expected to grow in this century and perhaps even into the next.

It seems unlikely, however, that Africa can replicate the recent economic success of Asia. Africa’s post-1950 record provides few grounds for optimism. Take as a hypothetical objective the rate of growth of five percent per capita maintained over at least five years, which is ambitious but not unattainable: only six African countries have succeeded in achieving it in the past 70 years. These exceptional episodes of growth involved in all but one case very small countries (in terms of population) and those whose growth depended on an export commodity (oil in the case of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and cocoa in the case of Côte d’Ivoire). Botswana and Cape Verde managed it, too, but they are very small countries. Ethiopia was the only populous country (with more than 100 million people) that sustained a high rate of growth, which it did for 13 consecutive years, from 2005 to 2017. This trend has since ended, owing to the outbreak of a new civil war in 2020 and renewed conflict with Eritrea.

This simple exercise suggests that the most populous African countries—Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and South Africa—will have to buck historic trends to play the role that China has in recent decades in reducing global inequality. Of course, many observers thought it unlikely that Asia would see tremendous economic growth. The Swedish economist and Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Myrdal, for example, predicted in his 1968 book, Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations, that Asia would remain poor for the foreseeable future, given its apparent overpopulation and limited technological progress. But just a decade after the publication of Myrdal’s book, the region began to register exceptionally high rates of growth and became a leader in some areas of technology.

Counting Nigerian naira notes in Yola, Nigeria, February 2023 Esa Alexander / Reuters

Aid is unlikely to be a significant driver of growth. The previous six decades of experience with Western aid to Africa unmistakably show that such support does not guarantee development in the country. Aid is both insufficient and irrelevant. It is insufficient because rich countries have never devoted much of their GDPs to foreign aid; the United States, the richest country in the world, currently gives away only 0.18 percent of its GDP in aid, and a significant portion of that is classified as “security related” and used for purchases of U.S. military equipment. But even if aid totals were greater, they would be irrelevant. The track record of African recipients of aid suggests that such support fails to generate meaningful economic growth. Aid is often misallocated and even stolen. It produces effects like those of the “resource curse,” in which a country blessed with a particularly valuable commodity still underperforms: it experiences tremendous initial gains without any meaningful follow-up or more sustainable, broadly shared prosperity.

If Africa continues to languish, such stagnation will keep driving many people to migrate. After all, the gains from migration are enormous: a person with a median income in Tunisia who moves to France and starts earning there at, say, the 20th French income percentile would still have multiplied his earnings by almost three, in addition to creating better life chances for his children. Sub-Saharan Africans can gain even more by moving to Europe: a person earning the median income in Uganda who moves to Norway and earns at the level of the Norwegian 20th percentile will have multiplied his earnings 18-fold. The inability of African economies to catch up with wealthier peers (and thus fail to produce a future reduction in global income inequality) will spur more migration and may strengthen xenophobic, nativist political parties in rich countries, especially in Europe.

Africa’s abundance of natural resources combined with its persistent poverty and weak governments will lead dominant global powers to vie over the continent. Although the West neglected Africa after the end of the Cold War, recent Chinese investments in the continent have alerted the United States and others to its importance. The U.S. Agency for International Development has indirectly flattered China by not only shifting its attention to Africa but also deciding to focus on more “brick and mortar” infrastructure projects, akin to those favored by China. African countries are learning that great-power competition might not be so bad for them after all, since they can play one superpower off another. But there is a grimmer scenario, in which the continent divides into allies and foes, who in turn compete or even go to war. That chaos would make the ideal of an African common market that could replicate the success of the European Economic Community even more remote. The prospect of an African growth surge that could meaningfully suppress global inequality in the coming years is slim.

THE WORLD TO COME

Whatever direction global inequality takes, considerable change lies ahead. Unless Chinese growth slows substantially, the share of Chinese citizens among the upper reaches of the global income distribution will continue to rise, and correspondingly, the share of Westerners in that group will decrease. This shift will represent a marked change from the situation that has existed since the Industrial Revolution, with people from the West overwhelmingly represented at the top of the global income pyramid and even poor Westerners ranked high in global terms. The gradual slide in the global income position of the lower and lower-middle classes in the West creates a new source of domestic polarization: the rich in a given Western country will remain rich in global terms, but the poor in that country will slide down the global pecking order. As for the downward trend in global inequality, it requires strong economic growth in populous African countries—but that remains unlikely. Migration out of Africa, great-power competition over the continent’s resources, and the persistence of poverty and weak governments will probably lie in Africa’s future as they have in its past.

And yet a more equal world remains a salutary objective. Few thinkers better grasped the importance of equality among countries than the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the founder of political economy. In his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, he observed how the gulf in wealth and power between the West and the rest of the world led to colonization and unjust wars: “The superiority of force [was] . . . so great on the side of the Europeans that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries,” he wrote. Great disparities fueled violence and inhumanity, but Smith still saw reason for hope. “Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker,” Smith imagined. “And the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another.”