• Half the world -- nearly three billion people -- live on less than two dollars a day. (The politics of hunger, Le Monde, November 1998,March recognizes the billions living on less than two dollars a day, October 24, 2000)

• The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the world's countries) is less than the wealth of the world's three richest people combined.  (The politics of hunger, Le Monde, November 1998)

• Nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names. (The State of the World's Children, 1999, UNICEF)

• Less than one per cent of what the world spends every year on weapons would be needed to put every child into school by the year 2000. ( State of the World, Issue 287 - Feb 1997, New Internationalist)

• 51 percent of the world's 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are owned by corporations. (Holding Transnationals Accountable, IPS, August 11, 1998)

• The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. (The Corporate Planet, Corporate Watch, 1997)

• The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.( Debt - The facts, Issue 312 - May 1999, New Internationalist)

• 20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the worlds goods. (1998 Human Development Report)

• The top fifth of the world's people in the richest countries enjoy 82% of the expanding export trade and 68% of foreign direct investment -- the bottom fifth, barely more than 1%. (1999 Human Development Report)

• In 1960, the 20% of the world's people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% -- in 1997, 74 times as much. (1999 Human Development Report)

• An analysis of long-term trends shows the distance between the richest and poorest countries was about :

  3 to 1 in 1820
11 to 1 in 1913
35 to 1 in 1950
44 to 1 in 1973
72 to 1 in 1992  (1999 Human Development Report)

• "The lives of 1.7 million children will be needlessly lost this year [2000] because world governments have failed to reduce poverty levels" (Missing the Target; The price of empty promises, Oxfam, June 2000)

• The developing world now spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants.( Global Development Finance, World Bank, 1999)

• A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world's poorest 2.5 billion people. (Economics forever; Building sustainability into economic policy PANOS Briefing 38, March 2000)

• "The 48 poorest countries account for less than 0.4 per cent of global exports." ( Human Development Report 2000, p. 82, United Nations)

• "The combined wealth of the world's 200 richest people hit $1 trillion in 1999; the combined incomes of the 582 million people living in the 43 least developed countries is $146 billion." (Human Development Report 2000,United Nations)

• "Of all human rights failures today, those in economic and social areas affect by far the larger number and are the most widespread across the world's nations and large numbers of people." (Human Development Report 2000,  United Nations)

• "Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific"  (World Resources Institute Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems, February 2001, (in the Food Feed and Fiber section)

• "7 Million children die each year as a result of the debt crisis 8,525,038 children have died since the start of the year 2000." (The home page of the Jubilee 2000 web site, as of March 24, 2001)

Check out this link questioning the  notion of Progress. It has many statistics.