DEBATING GLOBALISATION Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

DEBATING GLOBALISATION - Essay Example The most affected countries as per the report are Canada, Norway, Germany and the United States. The inequality is a global risk from both political and economic perspectives. Moreover, it suggests that large gap between the poor and rich posed a major challenge of political power being controlled by a handful of wealthy individuals (Atkinson, 2003). According to an article ‘Gap between rich and poor growing fastest in Britain’ in Telegraph (2011), tax rates have declined and income of top 1% of earners such as bankers, executives and managers in Britain has doubled since 1980 while benefits to the poor have declined severely to make them poorer. The low tax rate should have contributed towards shrinking of the gap, but it could not manage to keep pace with soaring wages of the rich in the country. The Gini coefficient, that measures the income distribution in a society, shows that since 1975, income inequality has been rising faster than other countries. Gini coefficient is considered as the benchmark of inequality, where zero is equivalent to equal income distribution and one stands for all income being accumulated to the richest person. Hence, an increasing Gini coefficient is considered unhealthy for an economy (Weeks, 2005). The economic cost of higher income disparity is increase in wastage of human resources. It implies that either a large portion of working population will be unemployed or they will be underemployed. Surprisingly, inequality is not limited to income structure; it affects opportunity and outcomes as well. According to a recent report by OECD (2008), it was found that the earning of 10% of the richest individuals in OECD countries is nine times more than that of 10% of the poorest individuals. In different countries, the statistical figures are different but the only common factor is that the disparity is high. The report further exclaimed that when poverty was measured nation wise, the result was