Global Inequality: From Class to Location, from Proletarians to Migrants

This essay analyzes Branko Milanovic's article on global inequality and its classification based on class and location. It suggests policies for reducing inequality and poverty through migration, self-interest of countries, and aids.

Running head: INTERPRETATIVE ESSAY
Interpretative Essay
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1INTERPRETATIVE ESSAY
This essay has been presented in an interpretative form to analyse the argument of the
writer of the chosen article. The selected article for this essay is Global Inequality: From
Class to Location, from Proletarians to Migrants by Branko Milanovic (Milanovic, B., 2012).
The above-mentioned article by Milanovic has elaborated the entire topic with the
context of Marxism. The essay discusses the global issue of inequality and its classification.
It can exist in various levels of the society. People can be divided on the basis of their class
and location. Financial income of a family decides their class within the society. Rich people
belong to capitalist group, whereas, poor people are called Proletarians. Not only from the
perspective of the people, countries can be capitalist or proletarians based on their economic
condition. Income differences between countries are responsible for the migration. People
migrate generally from developing to developed countries. Therefore, in order to prevent
migration according to Milanovic (2013), developing countries must engage themselves into
productive works of improvement, so that people do not have to leave their own country for
reasons of individual survival. Although, migration is considered as global political issue, yet
it cannot be denied that it is the tool, which has the capability to reduce the rate of poverty
and inequality on global scale (Fosu 2015).
The writer of the article has found several policies, which can be implemented and
need a multilateral approach in order to mitigate global problem of inequality. According to
him, the rate of immigration is related to economic gaps between countries on larger scale.
As mentioned in Alvaredo and Gasparini (2015), by not only providing aids but also
migration for various reasons can be considered as a tool of reducing poverty. As instance,
America is considered as a country of migrators as it is the home for people of several
nations. Currently, the country is facing trouble with migration flow and is trying to impose
migration laws. However, according to the writer countries like America should think for

2INTERPRETATIVE ESSAY
alternatives like helping the other countries from where they are receiving larger number of
migrators.
The nature of global inequality has been changed from 19th century to 21st. The writer
has used the reference of The Communist Manifesto in order to elaborate the scenario briefly
that how possession of capital makes people rich and labouring power makes people poor.
Emergence of middle class has been discussed. Writer suggested that workers with no
particular homeland is equally living in bad condition in every corner of the universe. As far
as 21st century is concerned, the situation is worse than that of the previous centuries. The
inequality among the people and countries sill measured by unequal economic conditions;
therefore, it is measured based on locations. The findings suggests comparing real wages in
rich and poor countries that the blank space between the poorest members of rich and poor
community is the largest both in income and wage data (Milanovic 2015). It is disappointing
but several poor parts of the country needs to work for a long time to earn as much as a rich
country does.
Therefore, from the article three facts can be generated apparently. At First, global
income inequality occurs due to the differences in mean incomes between several countries.
Secondly, information of inequality is well distributed among poor countries because of
globalization and finally, the cost of moving from one place to another is not the prohibitive
factor of migration. 21st century is extremely adjustable in terms of living their life. Self-
interest of every country, migration and aids can be considered as three main factors to
reduce the intensity of inequality and poverty.

3INTERPRETATIVE ESSAY
References
Alvaredo, F. and Gasparini, L., 2015. Recent trends in inequality and poverty in developing
countries. In Handbook of income distribution (Vol. 2, pp. 697-805). Elsevier.
Fosu, A.K., 2015. Growth, inequality and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: recent progress in a
global context. Oxford Development Studies, 43(1), pp.44-59.
Milanovic, B., 2012. Global inequality: from class to location, from proletarians to
migrants. Global Policy, 3(2), pp.125-134.
Milanovic, B., 2013. Global income inequality in numbers: In history and now. Global
policy, 4(2), pp.198-208.
Milanovic, B., 2015. Global inequality of opportunity: How much of our income is
determined by where we live?. Review of Economics and Statistics, 97(2), pp.452-460.