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U.N. report: globalization favors rich nations
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July 12, 1999
Web posted at: 7:34 p.m. EDT (2334 GMT)
From CNN Producer Ronni Berke
UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- Globalization, the economic interaction between countries, has generated unprecedented wealth for developed nations, but it has also driven a deeper wedge between rich and poor countries, according to a United Nations report released Monday.
The report, produced by an independent group of scholars and development experts for the United Nations Development Program, also ranked 174 countries according to their level of human development. According to the UNDP, people in about 85 countries are worse off in many respects than they were a decade ago.
The top five countries in human development -- as measured by the Human Development Index -- are Canada, Norway, the United States, Japan and Belgium. The 20 countries on the bottom of the HDI are all from Africa -- with Burundi, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Niger and finally, Sierra Leone last on the list.
According to the 1999 Human Development Report:
The UNDP report said that the recent wave of mergers is possibly eroding competition and concentrating industrial power in "megacorporations." For example, by 1998 the top 10 companies in pesticides controlled 85 percent of a $3.1 billion global market, and the top ten telecommunications companies control 86 percent of a $262 billion market.
The agency recommended that the benefits of globalization be shared more equitably, and criticized corporations for defining research agendas that hurt the world's poorest.
"In defining research agendas, money talks, not need -- cosmetic drugs and slow ripening tomatoes come higher on the priority list than drought-resistant crops or a vaccine against malaria," the report reads.
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