UNITED Nations experts warned today that growing inequality was hindering improvements in lifespan, education and income in a world where the 85 richest people have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest.

With nearly a third of humanity poor or vulnerable to poverty, governments need to put a higher priority on creating jobs and providing basic social services, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said in its annual report.

It warned that improvements in longevity, education and income are slowing down. But the agency also said the solutions were not complicated.

“It’s not rocket science,” UNDP head Helen Clark said.

“Where people do address things, development can come along very nicely. 

“Where they haven’t addressed a lot of vulnerabilities and development deficits, as in Syria, it all comes spectacularly unstuck.”

Eradicating poverty is not just about “getting to zero,” Ms Clark said, “but about staying there.”

Most people in most countries were doing better than ever before, thanks to advances in education, technology and incomes, the report claimed. 

But it noted that a “widespread sense of precariousness in the world today in livelihoods, the environment, personal security and politics.”

Nearly half of all workers are in insecure or informal employment while some 842 million, or about 12 per cent, of all people go hungry, it said.

The report also reflected a growing conviction among poverty alleviation experts that gains made in the late 20th century risk being eroded by climate change, a global “race to the bottom” by big corporations that is forcing more workers to live on less and government budgets “balanced on the backs of the poor,” said report lead author Khalid Malik.

The UNDP report is intended to inform and influence policy-makers.

It cites exhaustive data to illustrate the costs both within countries and on a global scale of growing inequality, at a time when the 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people.

“Most problems are due to inadequate policies and poor institutions,” Mr Malik said. 

“It’s not innate that people have to suffer so much.”