The Inequality of Nations

This is a prepublication version of an analysis of the world economy which appeared in ‘The Inequality of Nations’ in Freeman, A, and Boris Kagarlitsky (eds) (2004) The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in crisis. London: Pluto Press. ISBN: 0 74532 183 6. It develops and presents rigorously much of the analysis of ‘The New world order and the failure of globalisation’ presented to the annual conference of the British International Studies Association in 2002. To this it adds a substantial analysis of inequality within the main continental blocs in the economy today. It uses data published by the IMF’s World Economic Outlook team to assess the progress of inequality and grown since ‘globalisation’, understood as the period of intense financial deregulation and the creation of a world market in capital. It establishes that over the period of globalisation world inequality, measured as the ratio of income per capita in the global south as a whole and the global north as a whole, has more than doubled, whilst growth has been largely static. Inequality between the nations making up the ‘global south’ has however decreased rather than increased; thus the world economy retains, in a remarkably stable manner, the same characteristics it has possessed since 1914. It contains a bloc of rich nations containing about one fifth the population of the world, and the remainder, containing four-fifth the population, with inequality between the two blocs rising secularly in the long run. The article argues that competition between advanced nations now takes place on a continental scale, a process driving European responses to the crisis of US hegemony, and that responses from within the global south can be expected to acquire also a continental dimension. Documents containing charts and slides used to present the material to a seminar organised by the Norway Social Forum in Oslo, June 2003 may be obtained from the author