The hidden war against ordinary Colombians
The hidden war against ordinary Colombians
Apr 7, 2015 posted by Michael Puscar
Colombia is a land of opportunity, but not if you’re lower or middle class. In order to combat this economic inequality the country’s government would have to take up one of the most powerful players in the markets, the banks.
As a foreigner who has lived in Colombia for more than four years, I am jealous of Colombians. They are blessed with a beautiful country rich in natural resources with beaches, mountains, deserts, rivers and rain forests. The country is rich in petroleum, precious metals, wildlife and ecologic diversity.
It’s a welcoming, warm, diverse culture; it rich in tradition, with a strong belief system, work ethic and the fortitude to confront and overcome economic hardship and a decades-long civil war.
Colombia is where I succeeded as an investor, and where I have lived as a resident. I wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else.
But there is a dark side, too. While overt civil war all but ended years ago, a system rooted in inequality persists and class warfare still rages. It’s a system that treats ordinary, working class Colombians with suspicion, an apartheid of two classes that stifles the ability of the working class entrepreneurs to advance.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/the-hidden-war-against-ordinary-colombians/
= new reply since forum marked as read
UN: ´Colombia`s urban rich poor gap worsening´
By Kevin Howlett - On Oct 9th 2013
The UN claim Medellin is the city with the largest gap between the rich and poor, and that despite government claims to the contrary, the situation is worsening.
A report on urban equality in Latin America whose results were revealed yesterday, shows that inequality in Colombia`s urban centres grew by 15% between 1990 and 2010. Worse still, inequality is growing faster in Colombia than in any other of the 18 Latin American countries studied by the UN.
To preview the report`s official launch, in an interview with the newspaper El Espectador, the report`s director Eduardo Lopez Moreno claimed, “Colombia is the only Latin American country where inequality is growing in all of its cities”.
Consecutive Colombian governments have heralded record economic expansion over the past decade, pointing to annual GDP growth figures north of 4 per cent. But Lopez Moreno claims this has been “in no way pro-poor”.
More:
http://www.colombia-politics.com/urban-inequality-un/
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Here Are The Most Unequal Countries In The World
Andy Kiersz
Nov. 8, 2014, 8:15 AM
The World Bank has data on income inequality for most countries in the world. A common measure of inequality is the Gini Index, which describes how far away a country's income distribution is from complete equality.
In the World Bank data, the index ranges between 0 and 100: A country with a totally flat income distribution, in which every person received the same income, would have a Gini index of 0; a country with a completely unequal distribution, where one person got all of the income and everyone else earned nothing, would have an index of 100.
The World Bank's data set included 112 countries for which data was available for at least one year between 2008 and 2013. This map shows the most recently available Gini Index for each country in that data set:
Most of the countries with the highest indexes, and thus the most inequality, were in Africa and Latin America. Eastern and Northern Europe were highly represented in the most equal countries at the other end of the spectrum.
The US and China fell in the middle of the list. The World Bank's estimate of the Gini Index for the US was 41.1, and China at 42.1, both slightly higher than the average among all countries of 38.8.
Here are the ten most unequal countries in the World Bank's data set, along with the income shares of the top and bottom ends of the income spectrum:
More:
http://www.businessinsider.com/gini-index-income-inequality-world-map-2014-11
(WTF do they do with the billions of US taxpayers' hard-earned dollars they are still receiving since 2000?
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/gini-index-income-inequality-world-map-2014-11#ixzz3WsPyCK00
