HERE in Jamaica, where our minds are now set on coping with the challenges arising from the Administration’s unavoidable policy of fiscal austerity, who will emerge as leader of the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), and what that person’s strategy for growing the economy will be after the internal leadership election on November 10, 2013, we lose sight of wider but no less immediate issues of the greatest relevance to Jamaica.

This is unfortunate since, in bemoaning our experience under the prevailing austerity crisis and its consequences of inequality as reflected in the under-utilisation of human resources, it is always useful to compare our predicament with experiences in other countries.

For there is an abundance of evidence to demonstrate that the phenomenon of rising global income inequality within developed and developing countries is a malady not unique to this young country called Jamaica, which is trying to determine the modalities of development for itself.

New data from the Inland Revenue Service in the USA and professors Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty of the University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics, respectively, show convincingly that following on the recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis precipitated by the Lehman Brothers collapse, the incomes of the richest one per cent of Americans increased by 31 per cent between 2009 and 2012 — up from 18.3 per cent in 2007 — compared with growth of less than one per cent for the bottom 99 per cent.

Further yet, closer scrutiny of this data reveals in stark fashion that income for the bottom 90 per cent of earners actually declined in this period. What is more, The Economist, in reflective mode, reminds us that over the period 1933 to 1936, the same top one per cent of wealthy Americans only managed to “capture” about 28 per cent of total income growth.

But as the USA fights its way out of recession, the rich continue to fare significantly better than the rest of the country. So much so that some 95 per cent of the increase in American income since 2009 has gone to the top one per cent, which means that the share of national income flowing to this group has now reached a record high of 19.3 per cent.

And while this frightening picture of inequality is unfolding in the USA — which, to some cynics means that the “land of the free and the home of the brave” is in no position to show us the way to economic redemption — the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is warning that inequality is increasing across its 34 member countries.

Without getting too technical, the OECD has ranked its members according to levels of inequality, using what economists call the Gini co-efficient, which measures the extent to which the distribution of income varies from perfect equality.

By its ranking, therefore, the United Kingdom, for example, is placed 28th out of 34 countries, and the USA at 31. And, according to the Resolution Foundation in Britain, the richest one per cent in that country now owns some 10 per cent of national income. Only Turkey, Mexico, and Chile are more equal than the USA.

Slovenia, Denmark, and Norway, on the other hand, are but three countries within the OECD with the most equal income distribution.

Other OECD data reveal that from the mid-1980s to the late-2000s, inequality rose in 15 out of 19 countries for which long-term data are available. The increase, we are told, was strongest in Finland, New Zealand, and Sweden.

Some critics of the data on global inequality argue that the Gini co-efficient cannot tell if inequality is high in some countries because the top one per cent holds a huge portion of national wealth, neither can it tell if the majority of the country’s wealth is held by the top 25 per cent.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that rising global inequality raises some profound moral questions about fairness, social justice and economic growth vis-a-vis the less developed countries in the Caribbean, like Jamaica.

Britain and the United States, for instance, have become accustomed to delivering lectures to the leaders of these noisy isles of ours about fiscal prudence, nation building, fairness, stability, and poverty reduction, while their own governments preside over the wide gap between the rich and the poor amidst unprecedented wealth.

Much of this contradiction serves to compound the problem of tightrope acrobatics indulged in by the region’s governments in managing the “crisis”, while the region is still learning in its short years the anguish of public management and the demands of Westminster.

The other problem, of course, has to do with the increase in political power of the global economic elite. In the USA alone, the richest one per cent of the population pays 37.4 per cent of income taxes. What is the consequence of this?

One obvious consequence is that the most powerful country in the world — comprising 50 states and 16 territories with a population of 316.8 million souls, or 4.45 per cent of the world’s population — could come to be dependent on the financial power of a mere 1.35 million tax payers.

Similarly, Great Britain, with a population of 63.7 million, or 0.9 per cent of the world’s population, could come to depend on a meagre 308,000 persons who between them contribute some 30 per cent of government tax revenue.

One of the lessons to take away from all this is that there is need for a much fuller understanding in a country like Jamaica, of the importance of the rational use of the scarce human skills and talents we have at our disposal. This, after all, is part and parcel of the job and responsibility of growing up as a nation, and we need to learn these lessons fast and move to exercising our enormous capacity for real and sustained productivity.

Condolence

I wish to use the opportunity of this column to express my condolence at the recent passing of Sir Paul Scoon, retired governor general of Grenada; Mr George Lee, former mayor par excellence of Portmore, St Catherine; Mr Cecil Charlton, former iconic mayor of Mandeville; and the Hon Seymour Mullings, former parliamentarian and Cabinet minister who had a charity of the spirit that attracted admiration.

These Caribbean men all had soaring spirits that found their way to power, the exercise of which has left the region a much better place today. May their souls rest in peace.