Prosperity is the key to solving the migration crisis – and that starts with security

Here’s some very good news: global prosperity is at its highest level ever.

The Legatum Prosperity Index tracks 149 countries, and the 2018 results out this week see prosperity continuing to rise across the world, both over the last year and over the last 11 years.

More countries are becoming prosperous and more people are living more prosperous lives – this is to be celebrated.

Prosperity entails much more than wealth. It reaches beyond the financial into the institutional, the judicial, and the wellbeing of the people of a nation – it is about creating an environment where a person can reach their full potential.

A nation is prosperous when it has an open economy, inclusive society, strong institutions, and empowered people who are healthy, educated and safe. This leads to higher levels of wellbeing.

The news is not all good, however. The gap between the highest and lowest prosperity scores is the widest since we began measuring it in 2007, having grown apart since 2013, when the highest and lowest scores were the closest together.

Also concerning is the news that safety and security, one of the nine pillars we use to measure prosperity, has continued to deteriorate across the globe.

Our analysis shows that this is the foundation of any successful nation-building and enables the other pillars of prosperity to follow, from personal freedom, health, and education, through to a thriving business environment and sound governance. Without safety and security, it is challenging to build anything, and the pathway to prosperity is obscured.

This pillar measures the safety of individuals, rather than states, and more people today are experiencing greater insecurity caused by very real problems: a rise in wars, conflicts, hunger, and lack of shelter.

War, terrorism and oppression are driving insecurity around the world: deaths from conflict increased 58 per cent over 10 years, and deaths from terrorism quadrupled.

Despite the welcome fall in malnutrition and absolute poverty globally, more people report that they lack the basic requirements of food and shelter.

The number of people reporting their struggle to buy food at some point over the last year has risen from a quarter of the global population in 2008 to a third this year.

On the flipside, countries that have achieved long-term gains in prosperity show that, where leaders create a safe and secure environment, they provide a basis for a sustained improvement in prosperity.

Take Sri Lanka, a country that has risen up from years of civil war with an economy and society relatively intact, and as a result has shown a remarkable increase in prosperity.

Or Georgia, freed from the control of the Soviet Union, which has emerged steadily as the second largest riser in prosperity over the last 10 years.

The West African states of Cote d’Ivoire and Togo have also moved up as a result of improved personal freedom and governance.

Strong safety and security improves a country’s resilience to withstand external threats and recover quickly. Yet many countries in the Middle East and North Africa lack the institutional resilience to deal with deteriorating safety and security.

Of the 20 nations whose prosperity has fallen the most in the last decade, 12 are in Africa and the Middle East, forming an arc that stretches from Afghanistan in the north to Malawi in the south, bounded wast to east by Algeria and Yemen.

This arc tells a consistent story of war-torn countries that are highly insecure places to live.

Unsurprisingly, they are also the source of a significant proportion of the world’s migration.

In today’s interconnected world, insecurity in one country has a wider impact beyond its borders. Global migration, when driven by such insecurity, is the biggest single humanitarian crisis of our time.

When there is a breakdown in safety and security, people move. Neighbouring countries feel the immediate effects through migration and displacement – the desperate plight of Syrian refugees quickly becomes Lebanon and Jordan’s problem.

Although most migration is regional, rich countries further afield also become destinations for economic migrants, asylum seekers, and so-called illegal migrants who undertake long and sometimes dangerous journeys to escape insecurity at home, in search of a better life.

If we are to fix the global migration crisis, we must first address insecurity and help those countries where prosperity is falling.

Migration cannot be solved by simply tightening the border controls of the world’s richest countries – that ignores the root causes of migration and offers no alleviation of the human cost and suffering.

The solution is to find pathways from poverty to prosperity in every country, and the first step is improving safety and security. This year’s Prosperity Index proves it. We can only hope that governments and leaders around the world take note.