Sustainable Development

Intergenerational and Global Inequality

Sustainable development's biggest contribution is to broaden the scope of ethical thinking to include future generations among those to whom we owe obligations. It also holds important consequences for the practices of national accounting and for issues of global governance. Appreciation of the importance of genuine savings implies that we have to look anew at national accounts and indicators of development. Analysts have long agreed that national production and income figures provide little evidence of the fundamentals of development, as they indicate only how successfully the current generation is exploiting resources. With its measure of human development the United Nations (UN) Development Programme and its annual Human Development Reports have attempted to introduce a broader and intergenerational measure of development by combining data about education and health with national production/income figures. However, the literature on sustainable development prescribes that we also consider how countries manage their natural and human [Page 2575]resources with an eye to the future. Income ratios between the rich and poor have converged in recent decades (according to some measures and in some parts of the world) and infant mortality is declining across the majority of countries. There is also a perceptible narrowing of average human development index scores over time in the cross-sectional data. Some analysts take this as indicative of a narrowing of inequality between countries (which is only one but a very important dimension of the phenomenon of global inequality). However, when we measure in what shape the production processes and social policies of the industrial era have left the human and natural resource base of many parts of the world, it is clear that a devastating global divide is widening between those parts of the world where genuine savings have kept pace with population growth and those where fertility increasingly outstrips genuine savings. The evolution of this genuine savings divide is a tale of the misuse of power and the generation of privilege and of marginalization, and it places humankind before one of its most daunting policy and moral challenges: how to reduce global poverty and inequality now without exacerbating both in the future. Unfortunately, the international politics of sustainable development makes it unlikely that we will be able to meet that challenge anytime soon.

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