Economic growth feeds the rich
16/04/2011 15:40
Democratic MP Sula defends the opposition’s protest: A people sleeping in democracy wakes up in a dictatorship 08/10 21:10
Economic growth is one of the preferred arguments of governments when they want to give a message to the public that economy has been increased and citizen’s wellbeing has improved.
But the economic growth numbers show in fact the increase of the total national income. This indicator only is not enough for indicating if all citizens are profiting by the improved economy.
In Albania there have been few data that show how wealth has been distributed through social classes.
Some recent studies of the World Bank show that not everyone is equally profiting by the economic growth.
In 2002, the rich people, who were 10% of the population, profited around 22% of national wealth.
Since then, the percentage of this class has increased rapidly. According to the World Bank, the same group of rich people in Albania possessed by the end of 2008 29% of the total national income.
This means that for every 100 ALL of the national wealth, 29 ALL belong to 10% of the population. On the other hand, the wealth possessed by the poor people, who today are 10% of the population, not only has not been increased, but has fallen from 3.9% in 2002 to 3.5% in 2008.
The reasons are many, and one of these might be the flat tax. According to World Bank, Albania was in 2008 one of the countries with the greatest inequality between social classes.
All these data indicate that the economic growth is being accompanied by the deepening of social gaps, with the rich people becoming richer, while the wealth that the poor people possess is decreasing year after year.
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