The UN has released Human Development Data for 2004 (it usually lags by about 2 years). The changes per year are not large, but the website has added a new feature by which the Human Development Index (HDI) of a country can be graphed and compared to other regions of the world.
Currently, if the world is divided into three categories of human development (high, medium, and low), the distribution is as follows (from Wikipedia). The immediate observation is that outside of Africa, extreme poverty is a rare occurance in the modern world.
The older 2003 data is divided into finer segments to provide greater precision :
Upon examination of the data by country, a few other points present themselves :
Only 20 countries had a score greater than 0.800 in 1975, but by 2004, 63 countries had crossed that barrier. This can be linked entirely to the diffusion of technology, spread of globalization, and the emergence of the United States as the dominant economic model in the world, creating win-win trade arrangements with many other countries. The progress in HDI across the world thus mirrors a corresponding rise in democracy, which I have argued has led to a drop in warfare.
Ireland used to be significantly behind Britain, France, and Germany, but has now overtaken them. Guess what Ireland's tax rates are compared to those of the other three?
For all the media gloom about the US falling behind other countries, it has been ahead of the composite average of OECD countries by about the same margin for the last 30 years. The US economic growth rate continues to be higher than the average for OECD nations.
Mexico is considered to be a poor country, with a reputation for having citizens who seek to escape to the United States. However, it is still better off than most of the countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, including Russia and Saudi Arabia.
China will soon overtake Russia, which is still at a lower level than it was at in 1990. The rapid improvements in China have greatly reduced the total number of the world's people living in extreme poverty. Russia, on the other hand has been overtaken by at least 25 other countries over just the last 15 years.