Has the worldwide socio-economic gap between rich and poor gotten larger or smaller in the last 40 years? ?

Question

How can we not leave Africa and Central Asia behind as the world gets richer? Endless social programs? Regime change? Investment incentive?

Most importantly, is it better (for future growth prospects) to be healthy first or wealthy first?

Answer 1

Not all countries   make progress at the same time and some of the countries in Africa are doing very well.For an economy to grow they have to get  a lot of things right and more countries are doing so than ever before. Looking at the whole wold the inequalities between countries  is decreasing and and the countries that remain very  poor will probably not remain so. Wealthy countries are healthy and when aid is given it is easier to improve health, and  health is a necessary if not sufficient component  for improving the economy. Programs to improve health and control population growth has been very successful in the past but programs aimed directly at economic grow have often failed and sometimes  making a country worse off.

Answer 2

Depends how you look at it, incomes in developing nations as a whole have been increasing faster than incomes in developed nations, meaning getting closer. But if you break it down a little further, the rising incomes in the "developing nations" is largely in a handful of countries such as India and China, while a lot of others have not seen much growth. But the path to growth is pretty well understood, it is just not very well implemented. In other words, the problem is not that we don't know how to get nations out of poverty, we just can't force the governments to actually do what they should do. All we can do is try to demonstrate what should be done, offer incentives to do the right things, and hope for the best (or send the military in and remove the regime unwilling to do what is right and force them into it).

Healthy or wealthy? Chicken or the egg? You can't gain wealth if you are sick, and the wealthier you are, the better health care you can afford. I suspect that health care is very important to developing nations reducing poverty, but w/o education and government stability and other economic improvement programs, health care alone won't improve the economic prospects much, but if you don't do health care programmes, the other economic improvement projects won't be very effective either...