Living standards in the former Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa decline

Maggie Farley:

An annual U.N. report on development released today shows that living standards in the former Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa have been steadily declining while the rest of the world gets richer.

Norway tops the index that tries to assess nations' economic development, dignity and quality of life, and Niger is at the bottom. The United States is ranked 10th.

Iraq and Afghanistan are not included because of the lack of reliable statistics, and Liechtenstein is absent because it did not provide income information about its wealthy citizens.

"The index shows in clear, cold numbers that many countries are not only failing to progress, but are actually slipping backward, and they will continue on that downhill path unless the international community steps in to help with more resources and new policies," said Kevin Watkins, head of the United Nations Development Programme's human development report office.

The U.N. delivered the report to each of its 191 member states' missions in New York today and urged the world leaders gathering at the U.N. next week for a summit on development and U.N. reform to act to stop the slide into devastation.

At the U.N.'s Millennium Summit in 2000, heads of state pledged to change global aid, trade and security policies to halve poverty by 2015, among other development goals. But many of those promises have yet to be kept.

"The world has the knowledge, resources and technology to end extreme poverty, but time is running out," said United Nations Development Programme administrator Kemal Dervis.

Twelve of the world's 18 poorest countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, meaning one out of three people in that region live in a country that is worse off than it was in 1990, when the U.N. began to track the standard of living statistics.

The decline has been sparked mainly by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, causing South Africa to drop 35 places since 1990 and Botswana 21 places.

Russia and most of its neighbors of the former Soviet Union continued to lag substantially behind central and western Europe, though new injections of foreign investment and a new boom in Caspian Sea oil helped check the sharp downward slide that began with the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

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