Luxury residential apartments and hotels line Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Shantytowns, called favelas, are built...Read More >>Luxury residential apartments and hotels line Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Shantytowns, called favelas, are built on the hills overlooking the city. Around 85% of the world’s wealth is owned by just 10% of the world’s population, mostly in Europe, the USA and East Asia. In contrast, about half of the world’s population own just 1% of the world’s wealth. The wealthiest people have an abundance of money and property, while those living in poverty lack the money needed for basic necessities such as food and shelter. Poorer regions are often affected by poor sanitation, disease and war. The gap between the rich and the poor seems to grow ever wider. Measured by the average income earned by people in the richest and poorest fifth of the world’s nations, the gap has grown from 30 to 1 in 1960 to nearly 80 to 1 today. Within wealthy countries there are people who live in poverty; equally, there are wealthy people who live in less prosperous countries.
Gross domestic product
The gross domestic product (GDP) of countries in the world. The size of each country is drawn in proportion to the size of its...Read More >>The gross domestic product (GDP) of countries in the world. The size of each country is drawn in proportion to the size of its GDP. North America, Japan and Western Europe are the largest by this measure.The wealth of a nation can be measured by its gross domestic product (GDP). This is defined as the value of all the goods and services produced there, including those produced by foreign-owned firms. The Group of Eight (G8) are the eight leading industrial nations of the world. These nations—the United States, Japan, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Russia—account for more than 65% of the world’s GDP. The country with the highest GDP per person in 2016 was Luxembourg ($103,199). In the same year, the figure for South Sudan in Africa was $233. Around 1.4 billion people around the world live on less than $1.25 (75p) a day.
A report published by the charity Oxfam in 2018 reveals that just 42 individuals hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.
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