The golden billion (Russian: золотой миллиард (zolotoy milliard)) is a term, popular in the Russian-speaking world, referring to the relatively wealthy people in industrially developed nations, or the West.
Explanation
The proponents of the idea claim that their wealth of the West, including that of the lower classes, is partly based on exploitation of the former colonies in the third world. They usually advocate restrictions on free trade, especially with the West, and various state intervention in the economy schemes. The reasoning goes that the differences in incomes in first-world countries and third-world countries cannot be explained by differences in individual productivity. For example, the Caterpillar (CAT) factory in Tosno, Russia has the highest productivity of all CAT factories in Europe, but the workers are paid about an order of magnitude less. The difference is even more startling when comparing the wages of textile workers in United States factories and in China sweatshops. This means that the multinational corporations appropriate a disproportionally high share of the surplus value in "developing" countries. The argument usually holds that the continuation of this exploitation retards the development and prosperity of the developing nations. Hence, globalization and modern capitalism benefit mostly the golden billion, while people in the so-called "developing" countries are getting the short end of the stick.
Opponents of the concept
Opponents of the concept often invoke market efficiency to argue that free trade and capitalism will make everybody wealthy eventually. Proponents counter that the ongoing process of multinational corporations channeling wealth from poorer countries to richer ones dictates that the gap will not diminish. An online search for the terms "gold billion" or "golden billion" suggest that the term is little known in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, it is a very well known and popular concept in the Russian-speaking world. The underlying beliefs and arguments are by no means local to Russia and are very popular in the West, particularly among leftists.
