Business

Wealth gap across Asia
by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu

According to research, China and many other Asian countries are experiencing huge growth of the gap between rich and poor. According to the Asian Development Bank, this inequality has grown more in China than any other countries, except maybe for Nepal. While other countries such as India Cambodia and Sri Lanka experience the same growth in the gapsince the 1990s, only six Asian countries - Indonesia, Mongolia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Thailand - seem to have narrowed the difference over this same period. The bank considers the main reasons for this problem to be the discrepancy between the urban an rural areas - which favoured better-off, better-educated urban populations - and the rural infrastructure being held back by government policies which dettered private investment. "In a region as dynamic and vibrant as developing Asia, low growth in incomes of the poor is reflective of weakness in the pattern of growth," said Ifzal Ali, the ADB's chief economist. "Growing inequalities can weaken social cohesion," he added. Even if the urban-dominated China and India, gets in the way of foreign investment in remote areas, the ADB says empployment opportunities should be made more widely available instead of thinking about turning back the tide of globalization. "Inequalities in life start early and they begin with extreme circumstances that deny millions the opportunity to have adequate nutrition, health and basic education," the ADB added.

by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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posted by Blog TechSource @ 1:45 PM