Viewing Message #1
Time : Mon 12-Mar-2007
From :
Subject : Simpol-NZ Newsletter No 1.
Message :
11/03/07
Dear Friends,
Simpol-NZ was launched at the end of last year. Since then, I have to admit that very little has been done. The summer holidays, the demands of Sapiens and Sapiens Promise and one or two other unusual pressures of work upon my time, are my excuse – and not as convincing a one as I would like.
I have, however, spent several days producing a power-point presentation, designed more to be given to politicians and to political activists in NGOs, than to the general public. For those of you familiar with PPT software, the presentation can now be downloaded from the Simpol-NZ Websitehttp://www.simpol-nz.org/modules/mydownloads/viewcat.php?cid=6
If you wish to gain an understanding of the arguments for adopting Simpol, and a counter to the arguments for not adopting it, this would be a good place to begin. At that site, you will also find sundry other sample Simpol introductory talks, draft letters to MPs, etc. that can be downloaded. Our other PR assets are a brochure and a business card the size of a post card, which contains on the flip-side, an “elevator speech” summary of what Simpol is about. If any of you require any of these items, please let me know.
We have twenty Adopters up and down the country and that is with having made virtually no effort to recruit.
Now I am confident with my power-point presentation, I will be starting to get out and about. Today, much to my shame and disappointment, I missed my first opportunity. It was an appointment, which our Unitarian-Universalist members in Blenheim had kindly arranged for me. This was to give a presentation to the local branch of U3A. (For those of you who, as I was, are unfamiliar with U3A – do a Google on it – it seems a wonderful organisation.) I hope that I will be given a second chance.
Later this week I have a meeting scheduled with activists from the Wellington offices of a variety of NGOs – which I will not forget!.
Our strategy is to first of all attempt to recruit those most likely to be persuaded of the necessity of the Simpol programme. Clearly the Unitarians are an obvious such choice as they believe in the unity of mankind. The Baha’i and the Quakers are other religious groups likely to be immediately interested in our proposal. Other obvious potential Adopters of Simpol are to be found amongst those NGO’s, which are struggling to cure the adverse symptoms of the disease of global anarchy. They are already politically active and Simpol offers a practical way in which to tackle the disease, which is at the root of the symptoms.
At the moment our strategy is to recruit the first 100-200 Adopters and then to start introducing the concept to our political parties and their members. After that, we will try and recruit more generally among the population and start setting up local branches and formalising our procedures.
Our goal is to make NZ the first country in the world in which more than 50% of MPs are pledged to implement SP once other countries are ready to do the same. I hope to achieve this by at the end of the election scheduled for 2011. Ambitious certainly – but I believe it is perfectly achievable. I doubt that we will need the active support of more than 1% of the electorate to achieve this goal.
At the moment, I am the Adopter who is bearing the brunt of the administrative and marketing work. Things will not move particularly quickly until I have managed to recruit others who also have time available to offer the Movement. I will therefore not be writing lengthy newsletters. However, I will refer you to the Simpol International newsletter – which is quite a flash publication. It is circulated in hard copy in Europe but it can be downloaded in electronic format from http://www.simpol.org.uk/campaign_newsletters.php
To improve my public speaking skills, I recently joined Toastmasters. Below, I attach a speech I gave there, on a subject that might well become an appropriate subject for a Simultaneous Policy. We have first to arrive at the stage where SP Adopters can begin to formulate policies with confidence that the Simpol movement has advanced sufficiently to ensure they have a working chance of being put into effect. I am sure most of you can think of many other areas in which the world is in desperate need of cooperative policies, but which cannot be considered in isolation by individual nation states.
I have spoken in the past about world governance and the way in which the world is organised - not in an orderly fashion, but as an anarchic jungle in which those nations with the most military and economic power, dictate the fortunes of the weaker nations. This relationship is basically predatory rather than cooperative. We are all in the same boat, alone on this isolated planet floating through space and, instead of praying with our fellow crewmembers we are preying off them, raiding their pockets, stealing their food and reducing their opportunity to participate in, or to make a full contribution to the common wealth our planet could provide.
The current global economic system is dependent for its functioning on the twin institutions of the IMF and the World Bank. The basic structure is the outcome of a meeting held in 1944 in Bretton Woods, a small New Hampshire resort town. The present miserable condition of billions of our fellow humans is the consequence of decisions taken at that meeting.
I have here a handout, which will give you an idea of the extent of the injustice. Annual per capita income of the wealthiest 22 nations is in excess of US$30-60,000. New Zealand at number 25 averages US$25,000. None of the bottom 58 of the 187 nations listed in these World Bank statistics have an average per capita income of over $1,000 US. (And within those nations there would be huge discrepancies of wealth.) How can this injustice be remedied?
Herewith a small lesson in economics. When a trade takes place between two nations, the outcome is determined by two factors, how the goods are valued and the rules under which the trade is conducted.
If a country that grows coffee beans, wants to buy a car from a country that makes cars, it first has to borrow some of the car-maker’s currency to pay for the car. It thus gets into debt. To get out of its debt, it then has to export enough of its coffee-beans in return for sufficient of the car-maker’s currency, to pay off its obligation. If it fails to earn sufficient money to cover its debt, it finds itself sinking into a situation where it has to pay increasing amounts of interest on the loan. It therefore has less money available for investment in the education and business expansion on which its future ability to export will depend.
As so many of the world’s post-Bretton Woods nations have done, the unfortunate coffee bean producer, enters into a downward spiral of hopeless indebtedness and impoverishment.
Once a nation is poor enough, under IMF and World Bank rules, the powerful corporates of the industrialised world can come in and extract whatever they want from the helpless debtor and pay for whatever they extract, whatever price they choose to pay. Once in debt you are in a buyer’s market.
It needn’t have been like this.
John Maynard Keynes, the world’s greatest living economist, was head of the British negotiating team at Bretton Woods. Britain, as a result of the war and lend-lease was hugely indebted to the USA. Keynes was tasked with ensuring that in the aftermath of war, Britain, and indeed by default, every other debtor nation, would be able to escape from this burden of indebtedness.
What Keynes proposed was a scheme to break the deadlock of a system, which ensured the poor become increasingly poor and the wealthy became increasingly wealthy. What was needed was for the creditors as well as the debtors to be forced to change the terms of trade between nations.
Keynes suggested that a global bank called the International Clearing Union, the ICU, be established. This bank would issue it own global currency, the bancor. The bancor would have a fixed rate of exchange against each of the national currencies. All international trade would be conducted in bancors. Every country would have an overdraft facility at the ICU equivalent to half the average value of its international trade over five years. National central banks could borrow the first half of that overdraft allowance, interest free.
By definition, all the credits and debits of global trade would balance out at zero. As all trade was conducted in bancor, the issuing authority, the ICU, would know which countries were in credit and which were in debt.
All countries would be given an incentive at the end of each financial year to bring their bancor account down to zero. Not only would those nations, who retained debts in excess of half of their overdraft allowance, be charged interest at 5%, but so too would those nations that retained credits in their account. But this time the creditor nations would be charged interest at 10%. If creditor nations exceeded their overdraft surplus, the surplus would be confiscated and recycled to help the debtor nations pay off their debt. Creditor nations would therefore have a powerful incentive to ensure they bought from, as much as they sold to, the weaker nations.
Keynes had come up with a plan that would have transformed the whole global economic system and put an end to the vicious circle of increasing wealth and increasing poverty.
Unfortunately, with the end of WWII in sight, the USA could see that it was about to emerge from the conflict as the world’s biggest creditor nation. Its negotiating team were determined to preserve that position of power ad infinitum. Given Britain’s dependence on its trans-Atlantic ally’s assistance in the war against Germany, Keynes’ idea had little chance of prevailing. Instead the conference adopted the USA proposal, which has lead to the current system.
If every cloud has a silver lining, it is to be hoped that the silver lining in the next economic or political disaster that is bound to affect the global community sooner or later, will include an international conference to put into effect John Maynard Keynes’ original proposal
Dear Friends,
Simpol-NZ was launched at the end of last year. Since then, I have to admit that very little has been done. The summer holidays, the demands of Sapiens and Sapiens Promise and one or two other unusual pressures of work upon my time, are my excuse – and not as convincing a one as I would like.
I have, however, spent several days producing a power-point presentation, designed more to be given to politicians and to political activists in NGOs, than to the general public. For those of you familiar with PPT software, the presentation can now be downloaded from the Simpol-NZ Website
If you wish to gain an understanding of the arguments for adopting Simpol, and a counter to the arguments for not adopting it, this would be a good place to begin. At that site, you will also find sundry other sample Simpol introductory talks, draft letters to MPs, etc. that can be downloaded. Our other PR assets are a brochure and a business card the size of a post card, which contains on the flip-side, an “elevator speech” summary of what Simpol is about. If any of you require any of these items, please let me know.
We have twenty Adopters up and down the country and that is with having made virtually no effort to recruit.
Now I am confident with my power-point presentation, I will be starting to get out and about. Today, much to my shame and disappointment, I missed my first opportunity. It was an appointment, which our Unitarian-Universalist members in Blenheim had kindly arranged for me. This was to give a presentation to the local branch of U3A. (For those of you who, as I was, are unfamiliar with U3A – do a Google on it – it seems a wonderful organisation.) I hope that I will be given a second chance.
Later this week I have a meeting scheduled with activists from the Wellington offices of a variety of NGOs – which I will not forget!.
Our strategy is to first of all attempt to recruit those most likely to be persuaded of the necessity of the Simpol programme. Clearly the Unitarians are an obvious such choice as they believe in the unity of mankind. The Baha’i and the Quakers are other religious groups likely to be immediately interested in our proposal. Other obvious potential Adopters of Simpol are to be found amongst those NGO’s, which are struggling to cure the adverse symptoms of the disease of global anarchy. They are already politically active and Simpol offers a practical way in which to tackle the disease, which is at the root of the symptoms.
At the moment our strategy is to recruit the first 100-200 Adopters and then to start introducing the concept to our political parties and their members. After that, we will try and recruit more generally among the population and start setting up local branches and formalising our procedures.
Our goal is to make NZ the first country in the world in which more than 50% of MPs are pledged to implement SP once other countries are ready to do the same. I hope to achieve this by at the end of the election scheduled for 2011. Ambitious certainly – but I believe it is perfectly achievable. I doubt that we will need the active support of more than 1% of the electorate to achieve this goal.
At the moment, I am the Adopter who is bearing the brunt of the administrative and marketing work. Things will not move particularly quickly until I have managed to recruit others who also have time available to offer the Movement. I will therefore not be writing lengthy newsletters. However, I will refer you to the Simpol International newsletter – which is quite a flash publication. It is circulated in hard copy in Europe but it can be downloaded in electronic format from http://www.simpol.org.uk/campaign_newsletters.php
To improve my public speaking skills, I recently joined Toastmasters. Below, I attach a speech I gave there, on a subject that might well become an appropriate subject for a Simultaneous Policy. We have first to arrive at the stage where SP Adopters can begin to formulate policies with confidence that the Simpol movement has advanced sufficiently to ensure they have a working chance of being put into effect. I am sure most of you can think of many other areas in which the world is in desperate need of cooperative policies, but which cannot be considered in isolation by individual nation states.
Bretton Woods.
I have spoken in the past about world governance and the way in which the world is organised - not in an orderly fashion, but as an anarchic jungle in which those nations with the most military and economic power, dictate the fortunes of the weaker nations. This relationship is basically predatory rather than cooperative. We are all in the same boat, alone on this isolated planet floating through space and, instead of praying with our fellow crewmembers we are preying off them, raiding their pockets, stealing their food and reducing their opportunity to participate in, or to make a full contribution to the common wealth our planet could provide.
The current global economic system is dependent for its functioning on the twin institutions of the IMF and the World Bank. The basic structure is the outcome of a meeting held in 1944 in Bretton Woods, a small New Hampshire resort town. The present miserable condition of billions of our fellow humans is the consequence of decisions taken at that meeting.
I have here a handout, which will give you an idea of the extent of the injustice. Annual per capita income of the wealthiest 22 nations is in excess of US$30-60,000. New Zealand at number 25 averages US$25,000. None of the bottom 58 of the 187 nations listed in these World Bank statistics have an average per capita income of over $1,000 US. (And within those nations there would be huge discrepancies of wealth.) How can this injustice be remedied?
Herewith a small lesson in economics. When a trade takes place between two nations, the outcome is determined by two factors, how the goods are valued and the rules under which the trade is conducted.
If a country that grows coffee beans, wants to buy a car from a country that makes cars, it first has to borrow some of the car-maker’s currency to pay for the car. It thus gets into debt. To get out of its debt, it then has to export enough of its coffee-beans in return for sufficient of the car-maker’s currency, to pay off its obligation. If it fails to earn sufficient money to cover its debt, it finds itself sinking into a situation where it has to pay increasing amounts of interest on the loan. It therefore has less money available for investment in the education and business expansion on which its future ability to export will depend.
As so many of the world’s post-Bretton Woods nations have done, the unfortunate coffee bean producer, enters into a downward spiral of hopeless indebtedness and impoverishment.
Once a nation is poor enough, under IMF and World Bank rules, the powerful corporates of the industrialised world can come in and extract whatever they want from the helpless debtor and pay for whatever they extract, whatever price they choose to pay. Once in debt you are in a buyer’s market.
It needn’t have been like this.
John Maynard Keynes, the world’s greatest living economist, was head of the British negotiating team at Bretton Woods. Britain, as a result of the war and lend-lease was hugely indebted to the USA. Keynes was tasked with ensuring that in the aftermath of war, Britain, and indeed by default, every other debtor nation, would be able to escape from this burden of indebtedness.
What Keynes proposed was a scheme to break the deadlock of a system, which ensured the poor become increasingly poor and the wealthy became increasingly wealthy. What was needed was for the creditors as well as the debtors to be forced to change the terms of trade between nations.
Keynes suggested that a global bank called the International Clearing Union, the ICU, be established. This bank would issue it own global currency, the bancor. The bancor would have a fixed rate of exchange against each of the national currencies. All international trade would be conducted in bancors. Every country would have an overdraft facility at the ICU equivalent to half the average value of its international trade over five years. National central banks could borrow the first half of that overdraft allowance, interest free.
By definition, all the credits and debits of global trade would balance out at zero. As all trade was conducted in bancor, the issuing authority, the ICU, would know which countries were in credit and which were in debt.
All countries would be given an incentive at the end of each financial year to bring their bancor account down to zero. Not only would those nations, who retained debts in excess of half of their overdraft allowance, be charged interest at 5%, but so too would those nations that retained credits in their account. But this time the creditor nations would be charged interest at 10%. If creditor nations exceeded their overdraft surplus, the surplus would be confiscated and recycled to help the debtor nations pay off their debt. Creditor nations would therefore have a powerful incentive to ensure they bought from, as much as they sold to, the weaker nations.
Keynes had come up with a plan that would have transformed the whole global economic system and put an end to the vicious circle of increasing wealth and increasing poverty.
Unfortunately, with the end of WWII in sight, the USA could see that it was about to emerge from the conflict as the world’s biggest creditor nation. Its negotiating team were determined to preserve that position of power ad infinitum. Given Britain’s dependence on its trans-Atlantic ally’s assistance in the war against Germany, Keynes’ idea had little chance of prevailing. Instead the conference adopted the USA proposal, which has lead to the current system.
If every cloud has a silver lining, it is to be hoped that the silver lining in the next economic or political disaster that is bound to affect the global community sooner or later, will include an international conference to put into effect John Maynard Keynes’ original proposal
| Country | 2004 | 2005 | RANK 2005 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Luxembourg | 56380 | 65630 | 1 |
| Norway | 51810 | 59590 | 2 |
| Switzerland | 49600 | 54930 | 3 |
| Denmark | 40750 | 47390 | 4 |
| Iceland | 37920 | 46320 | 5 |
| United States | 41440 | 43740 | 6 |
| Sweden | 35840 | 41060 | 7 |
| Ireland | 34310 | 40150 | 8 |
| Japan | 37050 | 38980 | 9 |
| United Kingdom | 33630 | 37600 | 10 |
| Finland | 32880 | 37460 | 11 |
| Austria | 32280 | 36980 | 12 |
| High income: OECD | 33547 | 36715 | 13 |
| Netherlands | 32130 | 36620 | 14 |
| Belgium | 31280 | 35700 | 15 |
| High income | 32132 | 35131 | 16 |
| France | 30370 | 34810 | 17 |
| Germany | 30690 | 34580 | 18 |
| Canada | 28310 | 32600 | 19 |
| Australia | 27070 | 32220 | 20 |
| European Monetary Union | 27921 | 31914 | 21 |
| Italy | 26280 | 30010 | 22 |
| Hong Kong, China | 27130 | 27670 | 23 |
| Singapore | 24740 | 27490 | 24 |
| New Zealand | 19550 | 25960 | 25 |
| Spain | 21530 | 25360 | 26 |
| Greece | 16730 | 19670 | 27 |
| Israel | 17360 | 18620 | 28 |
| High income: nonOECD | 16341 | 17656 | 29 |
| Slovenia | 14820 | 17350 | 30 |
| Portugal | 14220 | 16170 | 31 |
| Korea, Rep. | 14040 | 15830 | 32 |
| Malta | 12100 | 13590 | 33 |
| Saudi Arabia | 10170 | 11770 | 34 |
| Antigua and Barbuda | 10130 | 10920 | 35 |
| Czech Republic | 9170 | 10710 | 36 |
| Trinidad and Tobago | 9070 | 10440 | 37 |
| Hungary | 8370 | 10030 | 38 |
| Estonia | 7080 | 9100 | 39 |
| Seychelles | 8170 | 8290 | 40 |
| St. Kitts and Nevis | 7750 | 8210 | 41 |
| Croatia | 6820 | 8060 | 42 |
| Slovak Republic | 6480 | 7950 | 43 |
| Palau | 7120 | 7630 | 44 |
| Mexico | 6930 | 7310 | 45 |
| Poland | 6140 | 7110 | 46 |
| Lithuania | 5840 | 7050 | 47 |
| World | 6338 | 6987 | 48 |
| Latvia | 5460 | 6760 | 49 |
| Lebanon | 6040 | 6180 | 50 |
| Chile | 4930 | 5870 | 51 |
| Upper middle income | 4731 | 5625 | 52 |
| Libya | 4560 | 5530 | 53 |
| Mauritius | 4640 | 5260 | 54 |
| Botswana | 4380 | 5180 | 55 |
| Gabon | 4080 | 5010 | 56 |
| Malaysia | 4520 | 4960 | 57 |
| South Africa | 3670 | 4960 | 58 |
| Venezuela, RB | 4030 | 4810 | 59 |
| St. Lucia | 4410 | 4800 | 60 |
| Turkey | 3750 | 4710 | 61 |
| Panama | 4310 | 4630 | 62 |
| Costa Rica | 4470 | 4590 | 63 |
| Argentina | 3580 | 4470 | 64 |
| Russian Federation | 3410 | 4460 | 65 |
| Uruguay | 3890 | 4360 | 66 |
| Europe & Central Asia | 3307 | 4113 | 67 |
| Latin America & Caribbean | 3584 | 4008 | 68 |
| Grenada | 3770 | 3920 | 69 |
| Romania | 2950 | 3830 | 70 |
| Dominica | 3670 | 3790 | 71 |
| St. Vincent and the Grenadines | 3400 | 3590 | 72 |
| Belize | 3460 | 3500 | 73 |
| Brazil | 3000 | 3460 | 74 |
| Bulgaria | 2760 | 3450 | 75 |
| Jamaica | 3300 | 3400 | 76 |
| Fiji | 2870 | 3280 | 77 |
| Serbia and Montenegro | 2700 | 3280 | 78 |
| Namibia | 2380 | 2990 | 79 |
| Marshall Islands | 2810 | 2930 | 80 |
| Kazakhstan | 2300 | 2930 | 81 |
| Tunisia | 2650 | 2890 | 82 |
| Macedonia, FYR | 2440 | 2830 | 83 |
| Iran, Islamic Rep. | 2330 | 2770 | 84 |
| Belarus | 2150 | 2760 | 85 |
| Thailand | 2490 | 2750 | 86 |
| Algeria | 2270 | 2730 | 87 |
| Middle income | 2265 | 2640 | 88 |
| Ecuador | 2360 | 2630 | 89 |
| Peru | 2360 | 2610 | 90 |
| Albania | 2090 | 2580 | 91 |
| Suriname | 2270 | 2540 | 92 |
| Jordan | 2260 | 2500 | 93 |
| El Salvador | 2330 | 2450 | 94 |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | 2050 | 2440 | 95 |
| Guatemala | 2190 | 2400 | 96 |
| Maldives | 2400 | 2390 | 97 |
| Dominican Republic | 2110 | 2370 | 98 |
| Micronesia, Fed. Sts. | 2300 | 2300 | 99 |
| Colombia | 2010 | 2290 | 100 |
| Swaziland | 1700 | 2280 | 101 |
| Middle East & North Africa | 1995 | 2241 | 102 |
| Tonga | 1830 | 2190 | 103 |
| Samoa | 1790 | 2090 | 104 |
| Lower middle income | 1666 | 1918 | 105 |
| Cape Verde | 1740 | 1870 | 106 |
| Low & middle income | 1507 | 1746 | 107 |
| China | 1500 | 1740 | 108 |
| Morocco | 1570 | 1730 | 109 |
| East Asia & Pacific | 1417 | 1627 | 110 |
| Vanuatu | 1390 | 1600 | 111 |
| Ukraine | 1270 | 1520 | 112 |
| Armenia | 1140 | 1470 | 113 |
| Kiribati | 1210 | 1390 | 114 |
| Syrian Arab Republic | 1270 | 1380 | 115 |
| Georgia | 1060 | 1350 | 116 |
| Angola | 930 | 1350 | 117 |
| Philippines | 1200 | 1300 | 118 |
| Paraguay | 1140 | 1280 | 119 |
| Indonesia | 1130 | 1280 | 120 |
| Egypt, Arab Rep. | 1250 | 1250 | 121 |
| Azerbaijan | 930 | 1240 | 122 |
| Honduras | 1040 | 1190 | 123 |
| Sri Lanka | 1010 | 1160 | 124 |
| Djibouti | 960 | 1020 | 125 |
| Guyana | 1020 | 1010 | 126 |
| Bolivia | 960 | 1010 | 127 |
| Cameroon | 890 | 1010 | 128 |
| Lesotho | 740 | 960 | 129 |
| Congo, Rep. | 750 | 950 | 130 |
| Nicaragua | 830 | 910 | 131 |
| Moldova | 720 | 880 | 132 |
| Bhutan | 770 | 870 | 133 |
| Cote d'Ivoire | 760 | 840 | 134 |
| Timor-Leste | 540 | 750 | 135 |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 607 | 745 | 136 |
| India | 630 | 720 | 137 |
| Senegal | 600 | 710 | 138 |
| Mongolia | 600 | 690 | 139 |
| Pakistan | 600 | 690 | 140 |
| South Asia | 598 | 684 | 141 |
| Papua New Guinea | 550 | 660 | 142 |
| Comoros | 560 | 640 | 143 |
| Sudan | 520 | 640 | 144 |
| Vietnam | 540 | 620 | 145 |
| Yemen, Rep. | 570 | 600 | 146 |
| Solomon Islands | 570 | 590 | 147 |
| Low income | 507 | 580 | 148 |
| Mauritania | 530 | 560 | 149 |
| Nigeria | 430 | 560 | 150 |
| Kenya | 480 | 530 | 151 |
| Benin | 450 | 510 | 152 |
| Uzbekistan | 450 | 510 | 153 |
| Zambia | 400 | 490 | 154 |
| Bangladesh | 440 | 470 | 155 |
| Haiti | 410 | 450 | 156 |
| Ghana | 380 | 450 | 157 |
| Kyrgyz Republic | 400 | 440 | 158 |
| Lao PDR | 400 | 440 | 159 |
| Burkina Faso | 350 | 400 | 160 |
| Chad | 330 | 400 | 161 |
| Sao Tome and Principe | 390 | 390 | 162 |
| Cambodia | 350 | 380 | 163 |
| Mali | 330 | 380 | 164 |
| Heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) | 336 | 379 | 165 |
| Least developed countries: UN classification | 336 | 378 | 166 |
| Guinea | 410 | 370 | 167 |
| Central African Republic | 310 | 350 | 168 |
| Togo | 310 | 350 | 169 |
| Zimbabwe | 620 | 340 | 170 |
| Tanzania | 320 | 340 | 171 |
| Tajikistan | 280 | 330 | 172 |
| Mozambique | 270 | 310 | 173 |
| Madagascar | 290 | 290 | 174 |
| Gambia, The | 270 | 290 | 175 |
| Uganda | 250 | 280 | 176 |
| Nepal | 250 | 270 | 177 |
| Niger | 210 | 240 | 178 |
| Rwanda | 210 | 230 | 179 |
| Sierra Leone | 210 | 220 | 180 |
| Eritrea | 190 | 220 | 181 |
| Guinea-Bissau | 160 | 180 | 182 |
| Malawi | 160 | 160 | 183 |
| Ethiopia | 130 | 160 | 184 |
| Liberia | 120 | 130 | 185 |
| Congo, Dem. Rep. | 110 | 120 | 186 |
| Burundi | 90 | 100 | 187 |
| Afghanistan | .. | .. | |
| Bahamas, The | .. | .. | |
| Barbados | .. | .. | |
| Bermuda | .. | .. | |
| Equatorial Guinea | .. | .. | |
| French Polynesia | .. | .. | |
| Isle of Man | .. | .. | |
| Macao, China | .. | .. | |
| Netherlands Antilles | .. | .. | |
| New Caledonia | .. | .. | |
| Puerto Rico | .. | .. | |
| Somalia | .. | .. | |
| Turkmenistan | .. | .. | |
| Virgin Islands (U.S.) | .. | .. | |
| West Bank and Gaza | .. | .. | |
| Kuwait | 24040 | .. | |
| United Arab Emirates | 23770 | .. | |
| Cyprus | 16510 | .. | |
| Bahrain | 14370 | .. | |
| Oman | 9070 | .. | |
| Source: World Bank | |||