Of course, if the poor countries maintain a higher growth rate than the rich countries for a very long time, theoretically they can eventually catch up. How long would that take?
Supposing the growth figures in the World Development Report remain unchanged, we can calculate that the poor countries will achieve the 1986 income level of the rich countries in 127 years. But they still will not have caught up, for the rich countries will have developed further themselves. At these rates, the poor countries will actually overtake the rich countries in half a millennium, 497 years to be exact. At that time, the world per capita income will be $1.049 billion per year. But in fact the growth rate for the poorest countries excluding India and China (it was mostly China’s reported growth rate of 5% and vast population that skewed the figures) is less than that of the rich countries, which means they will never catch up. And many of them have negative growth rates. It should be remembered that the per capita income in the ‘advanced’ countries of the North, such as Europe, Japan and the U.S.A., disguises a great degree of poverty in these nations. Much of the wealth of the
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