countries in the same groups.
Map 3 shows the lay of the land in 2008. The countries
shaded in the darkest color are the poorest in the world,
those where average per-capita incomes (called by
economists GDP, gross domestic product) are less than
$2,000 annually. Most of Africa is in this color, as are
Afghanistan, Haiti, and parts of Southeast Asia (for
example, Cambodia and Laos). North Korea is also among
this group of countries. The countries in white are the
richest, those with annual income per-capita of $20,000 or
more. Here we find the usual suspects: North America,
western Europe, Australasia, and Japan.
Another interesting pattern can be discerned in the
Americas. Make a list of the nations in the Americas from
richest to poorest. You will find that at the top are the United
States and Canada, followed by Chile, Argentina, Brazil,
Mexico, and Uruguay, and maybe also Venezuela,
depending on the price of oil. After that you have Colombia,
the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Peru. At the bottom
there is another distinct, much poorer group, comprising
Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay. Go back fifty years, and
you’ll find an identical ranking. One hundred years: same
thing. One hundred and fifty years: again the same. So it is
not just that the United States and Canada are richer than
Latin America; there is also a definite and persistent divide
between the rich and poor nations within Latin America.
A final interesting pattern is in the Middle East. There we
find oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,
which have income levels close to those of our top thirty.
Yet if the oil price fell, they would quickly fall back down the
table. Middle Eastern countries with little or no oil, such as
Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, all cluster around a level of
income similar to that of Guatemala or Peru. Without oil,
Middle Eastern countries are also all poor, though, like
those in Central America and the Andes, not so poor as
those in sub-Saharan Africa.
While there is a lot of persistence in the patterns of
prosperity we see around us today, these patterns are not
unchanging or immutable. First, as we have already
emphasized, most of current world inequality emerged
since the late eighteenth century, following on the tails of the
Industrial Revolution. Not only were gaps in prosperity much