The haves and the have nots

As we know from past experience that Japan has a fairly effective degree of resilience it would seem pertinent to consider it as the pivotal point of economic resilience. Any country whose rate is equal to or greater than that of Japan, which is 34, may be considered to have positive resilience. Any country whose rate is below 34 may be deemed to have negative resilience.

There are currently 183 countries on the IMF list. The top three ratings under the universal economic resilience rating scale would be Qatar 89, Luxembourg 81 and Singapore 57. At the bottom of the list Zambia would be the last country to have a rating of 2 and the following twenty seven countries from Benin down to the Republic of Congo would be attributed the minimum rating of 1.

It is interesting to note that there are twenty five countries, including Japan, rated as having positive economic resilience and 158 as having negative economic resilience to varying degrees. Also, of the thirty four OECD countries, only twenty are rated as having positive resilience. The other fourteen countries, New Zealand, Israel, South Korea, Slovenia, Greece, Czech Republic, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Chile and Turkey, are all rated as having negative economic resilience.

Minor shocks and bustles and catastrophes of intermediate magnitude and intensity, of whatever nature, may be absorbed by the economies of these countries to a greater or lesser extent according to the circumstances. The universal economic rating scale proposed here is not designed to apprehend the multiple variables of any such minor or intermediate events nor is it designed to measure the fine details of the economic resilience of the various countries to any such events. Its sole interest would be to serve as a single purpose macro-economic tool in credit ratings, for example, in the same manner as the Gini index is used to represent economic inequality.

Applied to the current global worldwide economy estimated at US$ 74 trillion GDP (PPP) for a population of 6.9 billion, the GDP per capita is $ 10 700 which indicates negative economic resilience on a worldwide basis. It is roughly the equivalent of the resilience of Montenegro. This, however, is purely statistical and of little or no practical significance in view of the harsh social and economic reality of the great divide that separates the haves from the have nots of this world. Nearly half the world's population is poor and destitute, 2.6 billion people, living on $2 a day or less, with one billion of them living on $1 a day or less. Dare we wonder just how resilient they are?

Three quarters of the poorest families live in rural areas despite the fact that the world became predominantly urban four years ago. Like the natural flora and fauna in the sub-Saharan savannas and other sub-tropical and tropical regions, they continue to eke out a meagre existence based primarily on natural resources. They remain vulnerable and their future insecure.

If we care to make the effort of reflecting upon the plight of those poor souls and wondering if there is something we can do to improve their resilience, it may possibly occur to us that global warming and climate change are major threats to their subsistence. They depend heavily on the quality of the ecosystem for survival. It is via the ecosystem that we can reach out and lend them a helping hand. Whatever we do to the ecosystem we do to them. The least we can do is to turn off the light.