April 21, 2024 (EIRNS)—The World Bank circulated a poverty and inequality report at its annual meeting which is shown only in a few charts on its website, but was reported by Reuters April 15 as showing that in the five years 2019-24 the income-per-capita gap between the poorest countries and the wealthiest has increased, what the World Bank called “a historic reversal of development … for the first time this century.” Co-author of the 130-page report “The Great Reversal: Prospects, Risks, and Policies in International Development Association (IDA) Countries,” World Bank deputy chief economist Ayhan Kose told Reuters: “For the first time, we see there is no convergence. They’re getting poorer. We see a very serious structural regression, a reversal in the world, and that’s why we are ringing the alarm bells here.”
The report evidently shows that there has been a net withdrawal of “public capital”—that is, sovereign and multinational bank development lending—from those 40 countries in those five years; most of the countries are in Africa; Afghanistan and Haiti also among them.
