Transcript for: Global Inequality: Life Expectancy, Wealth, Water, and Health
The world is an unequal place. Let's consider Japan. People in Japan live up until
the age of 84 on average. That's combined, the men and women. People in the US can live up
until the age of 79 on average. And France does pretty well; they live on average
up until the age of 82. Well, let's consider Angola and the Congo. Average life expectancy
is 51 and 52 years. Wow! That's a pretty big difference, huh? Thirty years different to
France and Japan, at least. What about India? India, people live up
until the age of 66 years. As we can see throughout the world, there's a tremendous amount of
variation in life expectancy. Life expectancy can be a mix
of many different things. Access to food, access to healthcare, access to vaccinations, access to clean water and sanitation. We can see that there's
a tremendous range. Angola and the Congo
are some of the lowest life expectancies in the world. Japan and France and the US
are among some of the highest. This shows you some of the big variation. Let's not just take life
expectancy, let's take water. Access to an improved water
source or cleaned water. In the US, almost everybody
has access to clean water. In Europe, the story is fairly similar. Half of the large parts of
Central and Western Africa, access to clean water is very difficult for a substantial number of people. In fact, up to a third of
people may not have access to clean water sources. As we can see already, just
by looking at life expectancy and access to clean water, the world does look like an uneven place. What we're really looking at here is global inequality. Something else is pretty
useful to do when we're looking at global inequality is
to draw a champagne glass. The reason why drawing a
champagne glass is really useful because the champagne
glass can help to explain the inequalities in income that we see. The inequalities in wealth
that we see globally. Because the champagne glass represents the distribution of wealth globally. Now, if we break down the
global population to fifths, and we take the top fifth ... in fact, we call them the richest fifth. The richest fifth have 82.7% of the global income. What about the poorest fifth? The poorest fifth, on the other
hand, barely get a look in. They barely see any of that income. They get 1.4% of the global income. What about the 60%, the
3/5 that are in the middle? The mathematicians amongst you must have already worked it out. They get less than 16% of
the income between them. As we can see, this glass
analogy works pretty well, because the richest, by far,
are getting all the money, all the income. They're getting the vast majority. There's another interesting
fact that I want you to know, the richest 85 people
have got more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion
people in the world. As we can see that there are
great inequalities in wealth. There are richer countries,
poorer countries, and there's a great deal of inequality in individual countries. Countries that are classed
as being relatively disadvantaged, relatively
poor, within them may have extremely rich
people, and there can be a great deal of income disparity
within those countries. We mentioned wealth;
let's move on to health. Let's take our champagne glass and let's turn it upside down, because one of the things I
really want to talk to you now is the maternal mortality rate. This is the rate at which
mothers die around childbirth. This is super important. This is a great marker for how effective, and how good the healthcare systems are. Now, I drew the champagne
glass upside down, because one of the things we
know is that across the world there is a great deal of difference in terms of how many
people die in childbirth. We start right at the top. We know that in Northern Europe and in America, between
10 to 20 per 100,000 women may die as a result of childbirth, so the rate is relatively low. As we go to, for example, South
America, the rate increases to say, 75 per 100,000. As we can see, that's gone up. Now we start to rise. In Southeast Asia, 170 per 100,000. Now, as we can see, we're
looking at right at the top of this upside down champagne glass. Here, we have Central and Western Africa. The rates here are 700
or more per 100,000. If we consider maternal
mortality to be a marker of a healthcare, system's
healthcare delivery, we can see that the stem of the glass, we've got relatively low numbers, right? Europe, 10, and then we compare that to Central and Western Africa, over 700. That's a 70-fold increase in risk. As we can see that these
numbers are pretty dramatic. This is a champagne glass
you don't want to be towards the bottom of unlike our previous statistic. As we can see, global inequalities
are rife, whether we look at them in terms of access
to water, access to wealth, or in terms of healthcare delivery.