Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, used the opportunity to share a positive message in his yearly email while snowy Davos is consumed in the activity of another World Economic Forum. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation co-chairs, Bill Gates and Melinda, wrote a 25-page paper in which they made the case that the world is better now than it has ever been. Even after accounting for inflation, according to Gates, there will be virtually no poor countries in the world by 2035. This is based on the current World Bank classification of low-income countries.
“Poor nations are not destined to remain poor. Some of the supposedly developing countries have already advanced, he claimed in his yearly note, which was released on Tuesday. “I have enough confidence in this to be willing to forecast the future. There won’t be many developing nations remaining in the world by 2035. Nearly all nations will be “lower-middle income” or richer by this time, added Gates, who continues to serve as Microsoft’s part-time chairman.
According to him, nations will gain knowledge from their most productive neighbors and profit from technological advancements like new vaccinations, improved seeds, and the digital revolution. “By nearly any metric, the state of the globe has improved. People are ageing slower and enjoying better health. In the past 25 years, the prevalence of extreme poverty has decreased by half. Infant mortality is declining. Many countries that received aid are now self-sufficient, he claimed.
Three major lies returning to Davos for a second year, Gates will speak on Friday to dismiss misconceptions about global development and take on its most vociferous detractors. According to Gates, the three largest fallacies are that poor countries are destined to remain poor, that foreign help is a huge waste of money, and that saving lives results in population growth.
He presents the opposing view, contending that things are improving around the world, using statistics from academics, the World Bank, and the United Nations. “I can see how people could have these unfavorable opinions. They observe this in the news. Reporters find it simple to cover big occasions where bad news occurs, he added. “Countries are becoming wealthier, but it’s difficult to document that on camera. Health is getting better, but there isn’t a press conference for kids who didn’t pass away from malaria.
The World Bank’s preliminary estimates show that between 1990 and 2010, the rate of extreme poverty was cut in half. This meant that, compared to 43 percent in 1990 and 52 percent in 1981, 21 percent of people in the developing world were living on or less than $1.25 a day. By 2030, the World Bank wants to reduce the rate of extreme poverty worldwide to no more than 3 percent.
Bill Gates is a frequent visitor to the WEF. He expressed his worries that austerity measures would reduce public financing for curable diseases including HIV, TB, and malaria at the event the year before. At the Davos last year, Gates told CNBC that “the money that helps the poorest comes overwhelmingly from government aid budgets,” adding that it was unknown what level of priority aid will have in next budgets.
