Westerners Underestimate Global Inequality

Most global inequality is between-countries, but inequality perceptions have mostly been investigated within-country. Five studies (total N = 2149, four preregistered) show that Westerners (U.S. American, British, and French participants) believe that developing and middle-income countries’ GDP per capita is much closer to developed countries’ than it actually is, and that people in developing and middle-income countries have higher rates of car ownership, larger houses, and eat out more frequently than they actually do, meaning that Westerners underestimate global inequality. This misperception is underpinned by a convergence illusion: the belief that since the 1990s, poorer countries have closed the economic gap with richer countries to a larger extent than they have. Further, overestimating GDP per capita is negatively correlated with support for aid to the target country and positively correlated with a country’s perceived military threat. We discuss implications for inequality perception and for global economic justice.

A Moral Language for Our Time? Human Rights and Christianity in Historical Perspective

On 3 October 2020 Pope Francis issued his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Signed in the symbolic location of Assisi, home of St Francis, the encyclical represented the pope's response to the fears and anxieties wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the burning injustices of racism, global inequality and climate change. The encyclical explicitly invoked human rights, criticising the ways in which, ‘in practice, human rights are not equal for all’. As nations and societies succumb to ‘disenchantment and disappointment’, ‘the temptation to build a culture of walls’ to keep out the ‘other’ grows ever greater. The antidote, Francis insisted, is a ‘culture of encounter’ in which it is again possible to ‘rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters who orbit around us’. Priority, too, must be given to ‘the dignity of the poor’ and ‘respect for the natural environment,’ rather than the privileges of the affluent to continue to amass wealth at all costs. Only then – by aligning human rights with the global common good – can rights become truly universal.

The Right to Meaning: A Syrian Case Study

This article unsettles what the literature describes as the ‘central paradox’ of cultural trauma theory: the idea that while atrocities are most prevalent in the ‘non-western world’, successful cultural traumas have primarily emerged in western societies. Examining the engagement of exiled Syrian intellectuals with the traumatic events of the 2011 revolution-turned-war in their country, the author argues that it is not a failure in the ‘cultural trauma process’ itself that prevents horrific events in non-western contexts from becoming recognised as cultural traumas. Instead, it is the failure to translate narratives of wrongdoing into formal acknowledgements and material or symbolic reparations. This failure is articulated by Syrian intellectuals as a ‘denial of meaning’. Many Syrian intellectuals construed the emancipatory demands of the Syrian uprising as claims for a right to meaning, that is, demands to restore language and existential purpose through public engagement and the revival of politics and speech. Equally, they saw as ‘denial of meaning’ the reality that their trauma work did not prevent the endurance and gradual rehabilitation of the regime but was met instead with the relegation of the movement to the agenda of the War on Terror. Thus, building on the discourses of exiled Syrian intellectuals, the article presents the idea of the right to meaning as a framework for understanding global inequality. Such a framework rests on a perceived dichotomy between those entitled to ‘meaning’ and those whose lives are accepted and treated as devoid of it or denied it.

Justice in the Eye of the Beholder: How Comparison Framing Affects the Perception of Global Inequality Through Social Emotions and Justice Sensitivity

Global inequality is one of today’s major challenges. How people mentally represent inequality is often determined by its comparative framing. In the present work, we seek to analyze whether putting the focus of a comparison on the disadvantaged or advantaged group affects legitimacy perceptions of and action intentions against global inequality. Results of two preliminary studies indicated that global inequality is perceived as less legitimate and action intentions are increased when the disadvantaged group is the grammatical subject of the comparison, but only when the size of the economic inequality is perceived to be large (vs. small). In addition, social emotions mediated the relationship between comparative framing and legitimacy perceptions. Building on these preliminary studies, we present a planned large-scale study in which we aim to replicate these effects and to additionally test whether the strength of individuals’ emotional responses to comparative framing is moderated by their justice sensitivity. We will discuss findings with regard to the role of how framing elicits certain mental representations of justice.

The Evolutionary Trend of Global Inequality: Analyzing the Impacts of Economic Structure

The aim of this study is to examine the evolution of inequality by focusing on the impacts of the economic structure. The technique of decomposition by income sources is employed to evaluate the contribution of the three major sectors, namely the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors to overall inequality. The data cover almost all the countries in the world from 2001 to 2017 for a total of 18 years. There are four stages of analysis in this study. The first stage of study is to provide an overall view of the evolutionary trend of global inequality, the second stage focuses on the North-South divide, the third stage determines the impacts of income groups, and the fourth stage investigates the impacts for each region. There are several salient findings: First, global inequality had declined in the study period. Second, the service sector is identified as the largest contributor to global inequality, followed by the industrial sector, while the contribution of the agricultural sector is negligible. For the North-South divide, disparity in the service sector was more marked in the North than in the South. The industrial sector played a major role in the South and contributed more than 40% to overall inequality. For the comparison amongst the income groups, our findings show that the higher the income, the higher the percentage contribution of the service sector (except for the low-income group). Finally, for the comparison across regions, although the contribution of the agricultural sector in most regions are below 1.5%; however, the contribution of the agricultural sector in both Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia is more than 8%. It implies that a lot of people in these regions still rely on the agricultural sector for a living, and the development in the industrial and service sectors in these two regions lagged behind those of the other regions. Our analysis show that the evolution pattern is very different for each region, therefore, it is necessary to take the effects of income and geographical location into consideration in formulating development policies.

The Making of Global Inequality

This article is a history of postwar discourse on an unequal world. This discourse was profoundly shaped by new influences: quantitative data and an expanding inequality research infrastructure, the “birth of development,” decolonization, human rights, the global Cold War, and theories of the world as one integrated global system. Examining academic journal articles written in English, this article traces the emergence of global inequality in the aftermath of the World Food Crisis of 1972–1975. Originally, global inequality was as much about power as about income differentials, mainly referring to multiple inequalities between the so-called Third World and the First. However, even as the late 1960s and the 1970s saw an increased politicization of the discourse on an unequal world, global inequality did not become a key concept in the 1970s.

Global Inequality in Service Sector Development: Trend and Convergence

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a huge impact on global service sector. In the pandemic background, to understand the disparity in service sector outputs at the global level is crucial for assessing the effectiveness of development policies in different countries. This study investigate the global service sector and it aims to investigate the transitional dynamics of the output from the service sector by adopting stochastic kernel analyses. Distribution dynamics analyses are carried out for all the countries in the world. The data are then divided into different regional and income groups to evaluate the impacts of geographical location and income on the development of the service sector. The results show that the Global North will continue to make greater strides, while the output capacity in many Global South countries struggles to reach the global average. Moreover, it is shown that countries with higher per capita income will perform better in the development of their service sector than those with low per capita income, thereby highlighting the persistence of global inequality. Finally, this study shows that the Sub-Saharan Africa region and the South Asia region both are very important in the alleviation of global inequality.