Michael Lipton argues that the greatest disparity in the world exists between city and country of the poorer developing countries rather than between the different countries, political systems or racial groups. He highlights how biased the distribution of wealth is in these countries. “The income gap between city and country is much larger in the third world today than it was in the early development of Europe and Japan.” In developing countries, wealth is being put to far less productive use than it could be. It is being channelled into cities where people are already better off rather than being used to increase desperately needed food production. “As a result, while many of the poorest countries have considerably increased their output of wealth since 1945, the poorest people have grown no richer and have sometimes been thrust into deeper poverty.