Buaban’s good fortune is no anomaly. While international news reports offer a grim litany of famine, genocide and chaos, much of the world is experiencing a far more positive development. For the first time since the reconstruction following World War II, a truly global economic expansion is underway. Not everyone is prospering: unemployment remains a major problem in Europe, Japan and Latin America, and breathtakingly fast changes leave workers temporarily displaced almost everywhere. But never have so many people been getting better-off so fast. Outside of some relatively small and badly mismanaged economies-Venezuela, Iran, much of Africa–living standards are rising and inflation is under control. While U.S. growth is slowing from the past year’s unsustainable rate, an almost insatiable demand for American products abroad will help keep the economy healthy. Says a top official of the International Monetary Fund: “I have a hard time remembering when conditions in the major economies looked so good.”

Next year, the IMF reckons, the world will grow by a smart 3.6 percent. That average is deceptively low, since it depends mainly on a few mature economies–the United States, Japan and Western Europe–that account for most of the world’s output. With Japan pulling out of recession, those wealthy countries are expanding in unison, a happy event last seen in 1989. But now every major nation in the developing world is growing with them. Longtime basket eases like Peru and Uganda are riding the wave. The new Ill-nation GATT accord, which President Bill Clinton last week vowed to push through Congress this year, will help sustain the trend. And there is little sign that uncontrolled inflation or reckless government spending will derail it. Says economist Stanley Nabi of New York’s Bessemer Trust Co., “There is a degree of fiscal and monetary conservatism in just about every place in the world.”

The evidence of this extraordinary turn is visible in the lives of people who, until recently, had little hope that things would ever get better. In her hillside shack above Rio de Janeiro, dishwasher Percilia da Silva Pereira marvels that Brazil has finally staunched the hyperinflation that sapped the value of her $37-a-week wage. “At least I know I can go to the market today and buy the same things I did yesterday,” she says. Signs of prosperity are visible even in utterly impoverished Vietnam, where the average income is only $250 a year. “Not long ago all anyone thought about was jumping on a boat and fleeing,” says rental agent Tran Binh Minh. Today, with Vietnam abandoning state ownership, Minh is snapping up properties in Saigon. “I’m making more money and living better here than I ever could in America,” he says.

Many of these newly prosperous consumers are eager to spend on American products they have only dreamed of. On Friday nights, young Taiwanese queue out the door for the ribs at TGI Friday’s in Taipei; with new restaurants set to open in Jakarta and Beijing, the Dallas-based chain expects to double its overseas sales next year. MTV, the cable music network, suddenly finds itself with more subscribers in Europe than in the United States. In New York, a cosmetics executive salivates at the thought of selling lipstick to millions of women in India. “All kinds of things unattractive about India five years ago have been changed,” he gushes.

Despite the general prosperity, not everyone can afford dinner at Friday’s. As urban incomes in coastal China rise nearly 10 percent a year, tens of millions of peasants remain desperately poor. In Japan and Europe, young workers struggle to find jobs even as employers, still shell-shocked from the last recession, do everything possible to avoid adding staff. “We’re not hiring, we’re cutting,” says Peter Wiegelmarm of Thyssen Henschel, which wants to shed 200 more workers at its Kassel, Germany, metalworking plant. Good times have finally returned to Britain after five years of painful U.S.-style corporate downsizing, but higher taxes have kept most consumers from feeling any joy. Creating jobs and protecting the earnings of the less skilled still top the agenda for governments almost everywhere. But for an unschooled worker like Buaban Wanmoon, a robust world economy offers the best job security there is.