![The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith](/cover_659403.jpg "The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith")
container port.
• The Shanghai Stock
exchange ranks third in
the world by trading
volume.
• 99% of residents are
Han Chinese.
• 16 major languages
are widely spoken in
Mumbai.
• With less than 2% of
India’s population,
Mumbai pays over 33%
of its taxes.
• About half of residents
live in unregistered
accommodation and lack
sanitation.
• As Pakistan’s financial and
commercial capital, Karachi
contributes 25% of national tax
revenue.
• The city’s population grows at
the rate of 1 person a minute.
Tehran
Istanbul
Cairo
Shanghai
Tokyo
• 99% of Tokyo’s
population is Japanese by
birth.
• 40% of the city is built
on landfill.
Mumbai
• Tehran’s population has grown
fivefold in 50 years.
• Air pollution (80% cars, 20%
industrial) kills about 10,000
people a year; in 2006, 3,600
died in the month of October
alone.
Jakarta
• Almost 20% of Cairo’s
buildings date from
1997 or later.
• 60% of the
population is aged
under 30.
• Up to 25,000
people a year die
from air pollution.
• 40% of Jakarta is below sea
level.
• At least 35% and
perhaps as many as
80% of residents
lack a clean water
supply.
• All Jakarta’s
rivers are
polluted – 71%
heavily.
Jakarta
93 hours
Cairo
105 hours
Mumbai
177 hours
Mexico City
95 hours
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35
52 Tourism R
PART TWO
WEALTH &
POVERTY
The two decades up to 2008 were hardly still waters in the global economy,
and the sense of safety and certainty about the economy that opinion-leaders
and policy-makers in the rich countries often expressed was always somewhat
shallow and misleading. There was a severe downturn at the turn of the 1980s
into the 1990s, followed by Japan’s lost decade, and the costs and upheavals
in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as they went through a massive
economic transformation, then an Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s
and the collapse of many new technology companies in the early years of this
century. And in the countries where there was more or less steady economic
growth, there were plenty of losers as well as winners, while global poverty
persisted. But there was also an unmistakable – and now absent – sensation
of forward movement, a confidence that economic problems were open to
relatively straightforward solutions, and trust in many countries that the hands
on the economic tiller were competent and dependable.
Today it feels so very different. And in the change of conditions brought about
by economic events since 2008, it is sometimes hard to disentangle what
has really changed and what not. As always, not everybody gains and loses
equally. One line of inequality has been narrowing and there is every reason
to expect it to continue to do so: the old idea of a sharp division in the world
between rich countries and poor countries no longer holds in the same form.
The contrasts are now more subtle, as other lines of inequality are getting
broader. Some countries are richer than others, but in the rich countries there
remains
