Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations
bottom of the income and status ladder (among those with highly valued and little valued skills, respectively)-is an important development. Growing regional inequalities inside countries are also a product of the "entanglement" of various types of inequality and inequity within and between countries and derive in part from the characteristics of the global economy. International justice and social justice have advanced or regressed in parallel.
2.4 Evidence of the decline in international justice from a developmental perspective Overall, the income gap between rich and poor countries and regions has been widening since the beginning of the 1980s. Per capita income in various world regions, expressed as a proportion of the average per capita income of the wealthier country members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), evolved as follows between 1980 and the beginning of the twenty-first century: the relative share declined from 3.3 to 1.9 per cent in Africa, from 9.7 to 6.7 per cent in the Middle East and North Africa, and from 18 to 12.8 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean, but rose from 1.2 to 1.6 per cent in South Asia and from 1.5 to 3.3 per cent in East Asia and the Pacific. Statistics on the world distribution of income indicate that in the 1990s a larger proportion of the African population moved into the lowest income quintile. The 2004 World Bank Atlas reveals that the 2.3 billion people living in low-income countries earn an average of US$450 per year, though in some economies the figure is as low as US$90; for the 3 billion people in middleincome countries, the average is US$ 1,920, while the 971 million in high-income countries receive an average of US$ 28,550. In other words, the 1 billion people living in wealthier countries account for 80 per cent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP), while the 5 billion people in developing countries share the remaining 20 per cent. Within regions, income inequality among countries has also grown.I2 The rise in income inequality between countries has been accompanied by growing disparities in the ability of various countries and regions to reduce the extreme poverty affecting portions of their population. Statistics indicate that the share of people living on less than US$ 1 a day fell from 40 per cent in 1981 to 21 per cent in 2001, but this overall decline masks widely divergent regional trends. East Asia and the Pacific, led by China, reported the largest decline in extreme poverty, with the rate dropping from 58 to 16 per cent. Absolute poverty also declined in South Asia (from 52 to 31 per cent), but remained steady in Latin America (at around 20 per cent) and rose dramatically in the former Soviet Union and in Central Europe. In Africa, the number of people living in dire poverty nearly doubled. In political terms, inequality between countries has certainly not declined in recent years. One country has gained hegemony, the Security Council has retained the same permanent members, and developing countries appear to have less leve-