Pretty much everywhere you care to look – academic papers, newspapers and social media – and across many different disciplines ranging from health to technology, economics to sociology and psychology to politics, inequality is an issue of increasing global importance. However, it was only in December 2017 that the first report on World Inequality was published. The stark warning from this report is that unless properly monitored and addressed, rising inequality is likely to lead to ‘various sorts of political, economic and social catastrophes’ (Alvaredo et al., 2017). This global report provides data and analysis to inform our understanding of the shifts and changes in inequality. The report shows that income inequality is rising globally, albeit at different speeds, with this being lowest in Europe and highest in the Middle East. In the United States, massive educational inequalities and a less progressive tax system have accounted for widening the gap between the top 1% income and the bottom 50%; such extremes inevitably lead to social inequalities and poverty. Savola (2017) argues that these divergences could explain the rise of populism as those people who are left behind see their living conditions either remaining static or worsening. In countries such as America, over a quarter of children under 5 years of age in 2016 were living in poverty (Smith, 2018) and in the United Kingdom, figures for 2013–2014 revealed 3 in every 10 children were living in poverty (Department for Work and Pensions, 2015). What do these global trends in inequality mean for children? Poverty is a key social determinant of health. For children born on the wrong side of the inequality gap, the outlook is not good and the adverse effects are wide-ranging...
Language: en
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