The poor get richer.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Data - Brief Article

You know the catechism: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and globalization is exacerbating inequality at an unprecedented rate. The message is hard to avoid. Representative of the conventional wisdom is the claim, in a background paper for the United Nations' 1999 Human Development report, that "the gap between the rich and poor countries and between rich and poor people continues to widen."

But the conventional wisdom is dead wrong, according to former World Bank economist Surjit S. Bhalla. In his recent book Imagine There's No Country (Institute for International Economics), Bhalla...