Poverty and Pollution



How Inequality will destroy Earth!



The tight lenders leach on the poor undeveloped countries creates hazardous issues that harm the Earth environment and potentially will destroy it. The use of coal and wood for heating, the driving of old vehicles, the garbage disposal and water contamination, the relentless woods destruction relates a lock of market i.e.economic development;

Distribution of Wealth: Inequality in 21st Century

The ability of Large Transnational Corporations and Investors to outsource and move industrial production, and invest globally has helped them gain profit in time of worst 2007-9 recession and post-recession accelerating and expending inequality;

“Many corporations have a greater turnover than the GDP of most countries. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are corporations and 48 are countries, and these corporations have sales figures between $51 billion and $247 billion.

Seventy percent of world trade is controlled by just 500 of the largest industrial corporations, and in 2002, the top 200 had combined sales equivalent to 28% of world GDP. However, these 200 corporations only employed 0.82% of the global work force.

In the US, ninety-eight percent of all companies account for only 25 percent of business activity; the remaining two percent account for nearly 75 percent of the remaining activity. The top 500 industrial corporations, which represent only one-tenth of one percent of all US companies, control over two-thirds of the business resources in the US and collect over 70 percent of all US profits.

According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), inflows of foreign direct investment to the emerging markets have grown by an average of 23 percent per year between 1990 and 2000. The combined value of stock markets in emerging economies is set to exceed $5 trillion in 2006, and has more than doubled in the past decade.

In 2005 the number of millionaires globally swelled to 8.7 million, 5.7 million of whom are based in North America and Europe. Forbes reported a 15% rise in the number of billionaires since 2005, who now have a combined worth of $2.6 trillion.”[ Share the World Resources http://www.stwr.org/multinational-corporations/key-facts.html

While the middles class in developed countries has been deteriorating in numbers, and poverty has stricken many individuals and countries around the Globe.

In current research we therefore extend the work reported in “Leveraging Inequality” (F&D, December 2010), which dealt with only the United States, to include an open-economy dimension. We find (see Chart 1) that what unites the experiences of the main deficit countries is a steep increase in income inequality over recent decades, as measured by the share of income going to the richest 5 percent of the country’s income distribution.

This increase in inequality has contributed to a deterioration in the richest countries’ aggregate savings-investment balances, as the poor and middle class borrowed from the rich and from foreign lenders. This, along with the other factors mentioned above, can fuel current account deficits.

Indeed, we find that as income shares of the top 5 percent increased between the early 1980s and the end of the millennium, current account balances worsened. For example, in the United Kingdom, an 8.7 percentage point increase in the income share of the richest 5 percent was accompanied by a deterioration in the current account–to-GDP ratio of 2.7 percentage points.[ Unequal = Indebted

FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT, September 2011, Vol. 48, No. 3

Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière

Distribution of Wealth: Inequality in 21st Century



]The Earth environment has suffered farther deterioration by being polluted through burning coal and wood, by cutting woods and destroying rain forests, by driving old vehicle, by disposing of garbage and row sewer and etc.

Mongolia is the world’s most polluted country and also home to one of the world’s most polluted cities — Ulaanbaatar. The country’s main sources of pollution are its traditional coal-fuelled stoves and boilers used for heating and cooking, as well as congested traffic and old cars. Heating is essential for the survival of its people for about eight months of year. The country uses everything from coal, wood to refuse, such as black tar-dipped bricks and old car tires to fuel stoves and boilers.[ http://www.cnbc.com/id/44781282/page/11%5D%5D

Neither of the top 10 polluted sites are in the U.S., Japan or western Europe. However, a lot of the pollution in poorer countries has to do with the lifestyles of richer ones, noted Stephan Robinson of Green Cross Switzerland—for example, a tannery in Bangladesh that provides leather for shoes made in Italy that are sold in New York City or Zurich. “The pollution we see is not coming from the major global industrial companies, it’s all from small mom-and-pop shops, which prepare the raw materials that we then later use,” Robinson said. Or, in the case of Agbogbloshie, Ghanaians are polluted by the electronic devices Westerners have already used. Local people in such areas, Robinson added, “are very often polluting their environment not because they think it is fun but because it is a question of survival.[ http://esciencenews.com/sources/scientific.american/2013/11/05/the.worlds.10.most.polluted.places.slide.show%5D



The most developed countries are taking prompt action to improve their environment through investing and tax initiatives to boost green energies and through enforcing strict environmental laws and regulations. However, it is not possible to take on some consistent environmental protection policies on just national level. To prevent from farther harmful environmental deterioration long-term Global policies should be implemented by the International Financial Institution of WTO, WB, and IMF widely supported and financed by the most developed economies of the US, EU, China, and Japan. But, most important, the ways the global marketplace “business as usual” should evolve into more engaging ways to promote a Green Market Development for many if not all undeveloped markets i.e. economies. An end of the budgetary debt economics that relates economic growth to productivity and investment only, by keeping firm hand on borrowers: individuals or countries alike, is necessary. Even from purely historical stand point of view the system that had performed well in North America, Western Europe, and Japan until the beginning of the 21st Century has been tipping off: :

the Globalization enveloped the entire globe with a very few exceptions,

the Internet and rising Productivity made outsourcing and moving of industrial production much easier,

and China has emerged as a great economic industrial power

Developments that have distorted the market equilibrium in many developed and undeveloped markets alike (with the exception of China, Germany and Japan after the Abenomocs) by bringing longe-term high unemployment and underemployment, debt accumulation, falling standard of living, and rising inequality that were shaking the foundations of the Capitalism, which short term relatively high lending rates, low market security, weak business and intellectual property laws, weak consumer protection and environmental protection laws that were suppose to boost productivity, investment, and growth have established conditions for bubbles and recessions, instead: the 2001 $ 2007 Recessions followed by sluggish recoveries exemplify it.

The conception of using market i.e. economic agents and tools in an “as it comes; as it goes” attitude to prompt Market Development i.e. economic growth is called Market Economics. It has become possible for short-term in History: since the turn of the new century, which brought some new capability for industrial overproduction by the same development that distorted the existing Capitalism. Whereas the technologies that improve Productivity, the Globalization, and China that utilized at best these new opportunities could become the market i.e. economic agents to offset the possibilities for shortages and inflation to allow long-term market development.

The Market Economics utilizes on such counterproductive for the Capitalism developments to prompt Market Development into targeted Environmentally friendly industries that could prevent from further pollution causal of an industrial production, productivity and investment approach, and in the same time create employment, replenish fiscal reserves, and allow a more balanced market approach in economics.

The economic agents in Market Economics are flexible parameters that adjust most recent fluctuations on “as it comes; as it comes” probability principle. A high Market Security is paramount to improve the investment transmission-ability, whereas less developed and undeveloped markets, and small businesses and investors are given access to relatively fair market competition. Targeted into Environmentally friendly industries and technologies capital infusion should be adjusted to the Inflation (not to the budget). On local for the developed countries e.g. Detroit and international for the International Financial Institutions the “invisible hand” should prevent from pollution, wasting of resources, destruction of woods, wetlands, etc.

Joshua Ioji Konov 2014