The United Nations University is an important marketplace of ideas. The U.N. is the normative center of international public policy. On Jan. 19-21, UNU brought together some of the best international scholarship with specialists from within the U.N. to focus on problems in the new century and possible solutions to them. The results of the debate were both surprising and challenging.
Global trends over the last two decades provide a mixed picture. Most social indicators continued to improve worldwide, the significant exceptions being sub-Saharan Africa and the transition economies of the former Soviet bloc. In addition, the "East Asian Miracle" spread to Southeast Asia, while China engineered a massive improvement in terms of growth and poverty reduction.
Yet, the last two decades also featured a slower, more unstable and increasingly unequal growth than over the prior decades. Income inequality rose in two-thirds of the developed, developing and transitional countries, as did the difference in living standards between the North and the South (with parts of Asia being the main exception).