Inequality, or the unjust distribution of resources such as income and opportunities within a population, is emerging as one of the government’s greatest headaches. The challenge is to ensure that in the pursuit of a high-income economy, all citizens are carried on board along the way, with none falling behind, ignored and unattended by the transformation of the economy. The challenge is also expressed in terms of avoiding the entrenchment of a two-tier economy where citizens are either super-rich or super-poor and thus dependent on social services. An authoritative study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with local authorities, recently provided the first look at Botswana’s inequality, ranked the ninth-worst in the world, and attempted to better understand the reasons behind the trend.
Inequality as an economic concept tends to be technical and steeped in difficult calculations such as the Gini coefficient, which is the standard measure of inequality globally. However, the UNDP report gives a very simple explanation of the trends in local inequality over the years. “To give an idea of the order of magnitude of this increase in the Gini can be expressed in monetary terms by saying that while in 2009-2010 the average difference in standardised consumption expenditure between two individuals taken at random was P4,068, this difference increased to P6,447 in 2015-2016,” researchers say. The consumption differences worsen if specific districts are set against each other. For instance, average consumption expenditure in urban areas is almost double the one of rural areas at P6,734 per month compared to P3,752. Consumption expenditure refers to the amount of money spent by households each month on their needs and wants.
