Dominating the list are high-income countries, whose average ecological footprint is now five times that of low-income nations.
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Businesses in low-income countries struggle with twice the burden of regulation as those in high-income countries.
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Yet high-income countries allocate 200 times more resources to mental health than low-income ones.
Research has suggested that total advertising bans can cut consumption by more than 6% in high-income countries.
In contrast, high-income countries in Europe and the U.S., where population tracking is more reliable, grew relatively slowly.
Most high-income countries report income and education disparities in their health care system.
The UN says that while health indicators in Gaza are comparable to middle and high-income countries, quality needs to be improved.
In particular, the willingness of markets to finance the deficits and maturing debt of high-income countries cannot be assured, the report said.
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In fact, the mobile industry has also enabled Indian immigrant workers in high-income countries to better connect with their homes in India.
The corresponding rate in men in the same group is between one to two times greater in men of the same age in high-income countries.
For instance, older adults in high-income countries generally had lower rates of depression than their younger counterparts, while the trend was reversed in several poorer countries.
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World Bank president James Wolfensohn has urged leaders in high-income countries to increase official development assistance from the current level of 0.24% of GDP to 0.7% of GDP.
Just take a look at a recent report on the state of single mothers around the world recently released by Legal Momentum, which found that American single parents are the worst off when compared to 16 other high-income countries.
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Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley and Michael Bordo of Rutgers University identify 139 financial crises between 1973 and 1997 (of which 44 took place in high-income countries), compared with a total of only 38 between 1945 and 1971.
Some 72% of Internet users still live in the high-income OECD countries which make up only 14% of the world's population.
However, 38 percent of high-income shoppers in both countries plan to cut back in the coming year.
Since 2006, tourism spending in East African coastal countries has risen 25% more slowly than other sub-Saharan African nations, mainly because of fewer arrivals from high-income citizens of OECD countries.
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However, the report says that prices remain "too high" for low-income countries, and that even if they could afford the drugs, their crumbling health infrastructures offer no means to distribute them effectively.
All of these countries are high-income economies, some of which are growing at rates faster than those for BRIC countries.
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The tax dodge using foreign-source income also favours companies that do business in high-tax countries: it is not obvious that the American government should support the treasuries of those countries (or, indeed, those of the handful of Caribbean islands where 95% of the sham firms are located).
The proportion of people who have ever had an episode of clinical depression in their lifetime is 15% in the high-income nations and 11% in lower-income countries, the study estimates.
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By shifting income from high-tax to low-tax countries through transfer pricing, using hybrid entities that are treated as corporations in some countries and flow-through entities in others, stripping profits from high-tax countries through intracompany financing, repatriating under favorable tax conditions, and other tax avoidance mechanisms, multinationals mitigate the impact of being headquartered in a high-tax state.
When countries were classified in 1990 by their status in the United Nations Human Development Index (an index of income, literacy and health), high-development countries achieved robust and stable economic growth during 1990-98, with average growth rates of around 2.3% a year and with 35 out of 36 countries enjoying rising living standards.
Kohl called on countries -- low, middle and high-income -- to work across disciplines to fix this problem.
Of 101 middle-income countries in 1960, only 13 had become high-income by 2008, according to the report.
The islands enjoy a high per capita income and a well-developed infrastructure as compared with other countries in the region.
In addition to looking at personal characteristics such as age and relationship status, the researchers divided the countries into high- and middle-to-low income groups according to average household earnings.
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The strongest economies of the high-income world ( Norway, Canada, Australia, some Persian Gulf countries) produce oil and gas, coal, industrial minerals or food for the expanding global marketplace.
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In high income countries, physical activity dwindles as people use more technology and are less engaged in labour-intensive work.
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