I agree. But I think there is a missing question. What makes a demand powerful?

Institutional advocacy often assumes the room is neutral, its occupants await a proposal, and the limits of what we can ask are fixed rather than shaped by politics and power. But a demand is not powerful simply because it is radical. Radicalism can clarify, but it can also avoid the harder work of organising, negotiating and winning change. In my view, moral clarity must come from evidence, judgement, law and lived experience.

For Palestinians, this is not abstract. During a genocide in Gaza and accelerating ethnic cleansing, demands once treated as beyond the pale have become the minimum required by law, morality and reality. End occupation. Ban settlement trade. Halt arms transfers. Pursue accountability. Recognise apartheid and name genocide. The question is not whether we are radical enough, but whether we are clear about what is right and strategic enough to make it harder to ignore.

None of these demands are extreme. What is extreme is that they had to be fought for while civilians were starved, bombed and displaced. For too long, debates on pauses, access, corridors, trucks and fuel obscured the choices driving mass death.

Advocacy should not make cruelty more efficient, occupation more tolerable or aid delivery more compatible with siege. I don’t think we should be campaigning for more comfortable slave ships. We should be demanding freedom. But neither should we stand safely on shore while people already aboard go without food, water or protection.

Abolition was not won by the right words alone. It took organising, legal strategies, campaigns, alliances, risk and sacrifice. A bold demand in a press release is not a movement.

Building another room cannot mean abandoning every existing one. Sometimes a technical point, made in the right room at the right moment, can be revolutionary. For someone facing bombardment or hunger, an achieved incremental demand can matter more than a perfect demand dismissed. Not everyone has thirty years to wait for justice to become realistic.

Moral clarity is not power on its own. Demands become forceful when carried by organised communities, partners, coalitions, unions, legal networks, students, diaspora groups and movements. They must be owned by those affected, not borrowed for institutional credibility.

In my view, Oxfam is not a grassroots or liberation movement, trade union or mass membership organisation. Mistaking reach for power is dangerous. Nor should we confuse sharper language with building power, bringing partners into rooms with sharing power, or alignment with movements with accountability.

Oxfam’s added value is not that we are the movement, but that we can connect the field, the street and the room. We can translate demands into policy, carry information from decision-making spaces back to those organising outside, and help make partners’ demands harder to ignore. Used well, our presence, expertise, relationships and access can turn moral clarity into political, legal and economic pressure.

This is what the Palestine work has shown. Oxfam did not invent these demands. Palestinians, partners and movements were already making them. Our role was to make them harder to dismiss through presence, technical knowledge, coalition work, legal argument and access. It was not moderation. It was strategy.

This is why operational presence and technical work matter. Communities demand humanitarian response when local systems are overwhelmed or attacked. Used badly, humanitarian work can narrow advocacy to access without confronting siege, displacement without occupation, aid without accountability, or hunger without naming starvation as a method of war. Used well, it exposes the political choices hidden behind technical language.

I don’t think the answer is to choose between being in the room, in the field or in the street. Humanitarian work can reproduce colonial power when it manages suffering without confronting what causes it. But it can also demonstrate solidarity, support protection and challenge power relations. The point is influence. It is about shifting power, resources and decision-making to community-rooted actors.

Our task is not to perform radicalism. It is to build the conditions in which radical demands become unavoidable by connecting presence to pressure, evidence to accountability, partners’ demands to political openings, and access inside institutions to power built outside them.

Saying genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing matters. But so do concrete demands and actions. Stop arms transfers. Ban settlement trade. Uphold international courts. End the siege. Protect UNRWA. Fund GBV protection. Resource women-led organisations and organisations of persons with disabilities. Reject displacement and containment.

So, in my view, the question is not whether we used the most radical word or demand available. It is whether we shifted power. Did we help partners’ demands travel further? Did we make it harder for governments to hide behind ambiguity? Did we connect humanitarian evidence to political accountability? Did we use access to open space, not close it? Did we strengthen the people closest to the crisis, or borrow their legitimacy?

Radical demands need power behind them, and a strategy to build it. Oxfam’s role is not to pretend it is the source of that power, but to use its evidence, presence, relationships, voice and access to help build it.

The task is not only to enter the room. It is to build power outside it, carry that power inside when needed, and never forget who the room was built to exclude.

END.

Author: Bushra Khalidi is the Oxfam’s Global Humanitarian Policy Lead.

Disclaimer: This piece reflects author’s views and should not be read as an institutional position of Oxfam.

Njoki dedicated her life to building a more just world. She was a Pan-African feminist, a fearless organizer, and one of the most influential voices in the global fight against inequality. Her passing leaves an enormous void, but her ideas, courage and generosity continue to inspire movements across the world.

To honour her memory, we’re resharing one of the most personal conversations we’ve ever recorded.

In this special Valentine’s episode, Njoki and her late husband, fellow activist Soren Ambrose, reflected on 23 years of love and activism. They spoke about meeting in the struggle against the World Bank and IMF, building movements together, sustaining a marriage while challenging injustice, and finding hope in collective action.

It’s a conversation that reminds us that movements are built not only on strategy and conviction, but also on friendship, care, joy and love.

Rest in power, Njoki. Thank you for showing us that another world is possible—and that it is built together.

This conversation was originally published on 14 February 2020 as EQUALS' Valentine's Day special. Today, we reshare it in loving memory of Njoki Njehû and Soren Ambrose, whose lives and partnership continue to inspire us.

As ever, do subscribe to the podcast, and do share with your friends and your family! Email us your ideas, suggestions and feedback to equals@oxfam.org

A major new investigation by Equals reveals how fossil fuel corporates have reaped huge windfall profits following the US and Israel war against Iran. It also highlights the impacts of their carbon emissions on extreme heatwaves and outlines the revenue potential for a ‘rich polluter profits tax.’

Exclusive new analysis of Big Oil reveals that:

• Their 2026 second quarter (Q2) profits are expected to nearly double, compared to the first quarter (Q1). Corporate polluters like ExxonMobil are making up to $1,800 a second.

• They are forecast to make more profit this year than the previous 21 months combined.

• Their emissions sufficient to cause around 1 in 4 heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023 – heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.

• They plan to increase oil and gas production by 14% by 2030, the equivalent of producing an additional 2.5 million barrels of oil a day.

• A ‘rich polluter profits tax’ could raise up to $400 billion and help phase out fossil fuels.

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Equals Investigates...Big Oil profits

Windfall war profits. The six Big Oil corporate: BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies, will publish their Q2 financial results over the coming week. Equals’ new research, based on financial analysts’ projections, finds that, overall, their Q2 net profits are expected to have almost doubled in the last three months (compared to Q1 profits) from $23 billion to $45 billion. Q2 results fully reflect the spike in oil prices following the unlawful US and Israel war against Iran.

Bumper profits for US corporations. The two corporations headquartered in the US are expecting especially massive windfall profits. Chevron’s Q2 profits are predicted to be over four times higher than in Q1, while ExxonMobil’s profits are forecast to more than triple.

ExxonMobil has made $1,800 a second in profits during the last three months. Chevron has pocketed $1,200 a second, and Shell $1,000.

The war against Iran has driven bumper profits for major oil and gas corporations. In 2026, the six Big Oil corporations are expected to make $147 billion, more than their combined profits over the 21 months from Q2 2024 to Q4 2025.

Profits driving inequality and the climate crisis. Big Oil’s windfall profits are being used to drill for even more planet-destroying fossil fuels and to enrich wealthy shareholders.

Shareholder payouts. In 2025, the six corporations paid out a total of $55 billion in dividends and $62 billion in share buybacks, which went to line the pockets of shareholders who are predominantly the world’s richest people.^[i] In the US, the richest 1% own more corporate shares than the other 99% of the population combined.^[ii] 85% of people globally are “capital destitute” (i.e. they get no income from financial assets).^[iii]

Bumping up production. By 2030, the six corporations plan to increase oil and gas production by 14% compared to 2024 levels, equivalent to producing an additional 2.5 million barrels of oil a day.^[iv] Just a 6% increase in global oil and gas production could lead to a 2.9º C increase in global temperatures by the end of the century.^[v] In 2025, major oil and gas companies BP and Shell cut their targets for future low carbon investments by 73% and 37% respectively.^[vi]

Emissions adding fire to heatwaves. Analysis of peer reviewed data^[vii] finds that, of the 213 heatwaves recorded between 2000 and 2023, 55 would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change. The historical emissions of Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies (data for Eni not available) were, on their own, enough to cross the threshold that made nearly all those heatwaves over 10,000 times more likely (50 heatwaves for TotalEnergies, 51 for the four others). This means that the emissions of any of those five companies were enough, on their own, to cause around 1 in 4 of the heatwaves.

Costing the world. The same research shows that the emissions of 180 largest carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) contributed to roughly half of the increase in global heatwave intensity since pre-industrial times. The five oil corporations alone account for 8% of this increase in intensity. Their contributions to global warming, as a whole, was about 0.1°C (6.5%) in 2023 and caused about 8% of global warming between 2000 and 2023.

Massive direct emissions. In 2025, BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies reported emitting a combined 358.3 million tonnes of scope 1 and 2 CO2e emissions from their operations (this doesn’t include their supply chain or customers). This is equivalent to the annual emissions of 55 million people. The estimated direct and indirect environmental damage costs, calculated by translating the quantity of resources used and pollutants emitted into monetary terms (using S&P Capital Trucost figures) $60 billion in 2025.

Disasters across the world. Big Oil’s quarterly profits come as record-breaking temperatures sweep across Europe and North America — extreme heatwaves that climate scientists warn would have been virtually impossible without the climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels.^[viii]

India and Pakistan have also faced sustained extreme heat in 2026. In May, 97 of the 100 hottest cities in the world were in India.^[ix] Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and other West African countries are experiencing devastating flooding.

The worst is likely yet to come. A “Godzilla El Niño” is forming over the Pacific Ocean which is forecast to drive global temperature to record highs, bringing with it extreme weather events. Poorer communities, already vulnerable to climate impacts, are bracing themselves for extreme heat, droughts and floods. The UN’s World Food Programme is appealing for funds for drought-resistant seeds, flood defences, water storage systems and cash transfers to avert a global hunger crisis before it happens.^[x]

Compounding global crises. Global crises are compounding, each piling onto the last. There is a global debt crisis: half of low-income countries are “at high risk of debt distress” or “in debt distress”.^[xi] At the same time, official development assistance has been gutted, with aid has falling by 28% between 2023 and 2025^[xii]. With food and energy prices already out of reach, those already vulnerable to extreme weather events are left even more dangerously exposed. Many countries are poorly prepared for the unfolding crises ahead.^[xiii]

Rich countries derailing progress. Against the backdrop of compounding global crises, last month’s essential Bonn Climate negotiations, which sets the groundwork for COP31, were derailed by rich countries.^[xiv] Negotiations to scale up cuts to global emissions and fund climate adaptation faced “gridlock.”^[xv]

Case for rich polluter profit tax. Oxfam has modelled a ‘rich polluter profit tax’^[xvi] which could raise up to $400 billion globally in its first year (based on 2024 figures), comparable to the estimated $290 billion to $1.045 trillion needed annually by 2030 to pay for the loss and damage caused by climate change in the Global South. This type of tax would be permanent, unlike one-off ‘windfall profit taxes’.

Political momentum for taxing rich polluters is building. Finance ministers in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Austria have called for a new windfall tax on energy profits^[xvii]. In Australia, where Oxfam research found that one in three coal, oil and gas corporations are paying no corporate income tax^[xviii], the government is considering options to tax the windfall profits from liquefied natural gas.^[xix]

Our research into the positions of 60 countries finds that 28% have implemented a temporary windfall tax on excess profits from fossil fuel companies, with a further 13% supportive. Just 12% are explicitly against the move.^[xx] Most countries that recently supported windfall taxes on fossil fuel producers/energy companies did so in response to energy price surges following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Rich polluters must be made to feel the heat. Not us.

The full methodology note for the research is here.

Note: the calculations were based on estimates made before TotalEnergies’ Q2 profit announcement on 23 July 2026. For the corporation’s second-quarter results, see its website.

^[i] Eni has significant state ownership

^[ii] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=453&eid=813804&od=# Share of Corporate Equities and Mutual Fund Shares in Q1 2026 Top 1% held 50.2%

^[iii] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/inequalities/2025/09/17/new-capitalism-in-america-part-iii/

^[iv] Oxfam analysis based on https://www.transitionpathwayinitiative.org/publications/uploads/2026-transition-planning-2026-decarbonisation-strategies-in-oil-and-gas-and-diversified-mining.pdf

^[v] https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2025

^[vi] https://www.ft.com/content/ce4da4e0-192a-494a-a1a7-bea940b146f3

^[vii] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09450-9

^[viii] https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/fossil-fuels-are-heating-americas-250th-birthday/ https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/fossil-fuel-emissions-have-rapidly-worsened-european-heatwaves-in-just-a-few-decades/

^[ix] https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/India/97-of-world-s-100-hottest-cities-in-india-why-balangir-banda-are-out-boiling-sahara-and-death-valley/ar-AA23OLGN?cvid=6a10edaccd5c4857b7409a05f90afb88

^[x] https://www.wfp.org/news/bracing-el-nino-fao-and-wfp-launch-joint-appeal-protect-88-million-people-extreme-weather

^[xi] https://www.equals.ink/p/default-on-debt-not-on-development?utm_source=publication-search

^[xii] https://www.equals.ink/p/rich-countries-turn-their-back-on

^[xiii] https://www.equals.ink/p/rich-countries-turn-their-back-on

^[xiv] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/oxfam-reaction-2026-bonn-climate-negotiations

^[xv] https://unfccc.int/news/written-statement-of-unfccc-executive-secretary-on-closing-of-un-june-climate-meetings-sb64

^[xvi] https://www.oxfam.org/en/blogs/rich-polluter-profits-tax-could-raise-400-billion-and-help-phase-out-fossil-fuels

^[xvii] https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/04/Letter.pdf

^[xviii] https://www.oxfam.org.au/blog/freeloaders-how-gas-corporations-are-paying-little-tax/

^[xix] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/03/australia-gas-tax-lng-exporters-predicted-windfall

^[xx] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aocqBrvMKJJeF-F5hyKFnVWa2Pv8IHwH/edit?gid=798616290#gid=798616290

Too often, climate breakdown and economic inequality are treated as separate crises. But what if they’re two sides of the same problem, and one cannot be solved without confronting the other?

In this episode of EQUALS, Nafkote Dabi and Max Lawson speak with Anmol Somanchi, Moritz Odersky, and Cornelia Mohren (Nelly) from the World Inequality Lab about the Global Justice Report, an ambitious blueprint for building an economy that delivers shared prosperity while keeping global warming within planetary boundaries.

We explore the report’s most radical proposals, including a Global Justice Fund financed through progressive global wealth and income taxes, with wealth tax rates of up to 20% for billionaires and top income tax rates of up to 90% for the world’s highest earners. The authors argue that these measures could dramatically reduce extreme concentrations of wealth, progressively bringing an end to the billionaire class while financing investments in clean energy, healthcare, education, and sustainable development around the world.

The conversation also wrestles with the inevitable criticisms. Is such a transformation politically possible? Can societies move beyond an economic model built on endless growth? And how do we build public support for climate action that improves people’s lives rather than asking them to bear the costs of a crisis they did little to create?

Guests

Anmol Somanchi is an Indian economist, researcher, and PhD candidate at the Paris School of Economics. He is the Global Justice Coordinator at the World Inequality Lab.

Moritz Odersky is an economist and research fellow at the World Inequality Lab.

Cornelia Mohren is an economist, Environmental Coordinator at the World Inequality Lab, and a PhD candidate in Economics at Sciences Po Paris.

Together, they are among the core co-authors of the June 2026 report, A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries, coordinated alongside prominent economists including Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook and on LinkedIn.

It was 1984. I was 12 years old, recording the pop charts religiously every Sunday on my shiny new cassette player. Every evening the family would gather around the television to watch the news. Every evening there would be stories of clashes between striking miners and their supporters and the police, with pictures of picket lines and running battles as the police attacked miners with truncheons and on horseback whilst they fought back.

The miners’ strike of 1984-1985 was a huge moment in British history. It lasted just over 11 months. The miners had the widespread support of the entire working class in Britain. Workers who felt that they were all under attack from the new Conservative government, led my Margaret Thatcher.

In the early seventies, the miners had struck successfully for higher wages and managed to bring down the previous Conservative government at the same time, with power stations closing and electricity blackouts forcing the country into a three-day week and darkness every evening.

Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative party were determined to have revenge. They first stockpiled huge amounts of coal, drew up contingency plans to use the army, and then deliberately provoked the strike. They were intent on starving the miners back to work- this was no exaggeration either as miners and their families had to endure tremendous hardship, especially in the harsh winter of 1984-85. My wife’s best friend’s father was a Scottish miner, and although only four at the time she remembers the many ‘poor days’ when they could only eat beans on toast because daddy was on strike.

Many support groups sprung up to raise money for miners and their families. In London, members of/activists from the LGBTQIA+ community got together and formed ‘Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM)’. LGBTQIA+ people in the UK were at that time subject to widespread discrimination, including in the workplace, often forced to live their lives in secret, or estranged from their families and subject to violence. The Conservative government under Mrs Thatcher also used state power to enforce this prejudice, banning the teaching of homosexuality in schools.

HIV/AIDS was also exploited to intensify homophobia, as growing numbers of young gay men started to die from AIDS-related illnesses, what was at that time a very poorly understood, feared, and incurable disease. Indeed, one of the founders and leaders of LGSM, Mark Ashton, died of the disease two years later in February 1987, aged only 26.

Pits and perverts

LGSM raised money from the LGBTQIA+ community in London and across the country for the miners; they provided support for a series of mining communities in the Dulais valley in South Wales. The Welsh valleys were one of the key areas of coal mining in the UK.

They took the money there themselves, staying with mining families and building relationships with the women and men organising and striking, and in turn miners came to London too, giving speeches at fundraising events, including a big concert in Camden London, where the Bronski Beat headlined (one of my favourite bands, then and now- their haunting synth pop song ‘Smalltown Boy’ about a young gay man having to leave his family and go to London is honestly one of the best songs ever). The concert was called ‘Pits and Perverts’, the name taken from a headline in the right-wing tabloid newspapers about LGSM and the miners.

Solidarity

It is a beautiful story of solidarity- a word that is not heard or used enough these days, I think. A recognition that two communities and movements, miners and the LGBTQIA+ community had far more in common than they had separating them.

Many of LGSM were themselves working class, and had grown up in similar communities, often experiencing prejudice and discrimination, but also very aware of the everyday realities of working-class life and struggle. Over the year, with the many visits, strong and lifelong friendships were formed, and walls of prejudice and division broke down through community and a common struggle.

Most importantly the two communities realised they had a common enemy. There is a scene in the wonderful 2014 film about LGSM, Pride, where one miner’s wife, who struggles with her homophobic prejudice, shows her husband a newspaper story about the gay community and HIV/AIDS. He says, ‘you know the lies they print about us miners daily-calling us the enemy within- why would you believe the lies they tell about these people?’.

This is the heart of solidarity: shared struggles without erasing differences, taking action knowing there is a cost of standing with others, especially when it is hard. It is about collective liberation, recognising that only in everyone’s liberation can you begin to transform conditions for yourself and for others. LGSM, despite their own huge struggles, chose to focus on supporting the miners, seeing their actions as part of a shared struggle.

The constant need to fuel division and hate

My own feeling is that prejudice, racism, homophobia, sexism; these are all things that need to be constantly maintained and manufactured; that they often rapidly crumble when people are able to meet, to talk and to understand each other better, to share common struggles. Not always of course- none of this is automatic or simple and prejudice can run very deep indeed. The point is more that I think there is definitely an ongoing need to prop up division, to constantly tell us that we have more that divides us than unites us.

I also feel that prejudice is actually perhaps more common within the upper and middle-classes. This is I think because of physical and financial distance from the ‘other’ and support for the status quo, plus often an additional level of class prejudice. These parts of society are also more likely to have the power to amplify and codify their prejudices through law and the media. For the working classes, it is true that competition for scarce jobs and public services is more common, and can be weaponised, but equally poverty, proximity and shared hardship can be a key source of solidarity and struggle too.

Victory in defeat

The miners lost the strike; it was a huge defeat, not just for them but for the whole labour movement and the working class in the UK. It is no coincidence that economic inequality shot upwards in the following two decades in the country, as the power of labour was cowed and the power of capital boosted.

But a year later, at the 1985 gay pride march in London, LGSM were joined by coachloads of miners from all over the country, who marched at the front of the Pride march. At the Labour Party conference that year, a motion supporting equal rights for gay and lesbian people was passed, in large part because of the unions coming in behind it in support, strongly pushed to do this by the National Union of Mineworkers.

In the years since then, there has been huge progress in securing equal rights for LGBTQIA+ people, both legally and within society as a whole. For my kids at school now, listening to them discuss these things so openly, the level of prejudice of those years feels like another world. But none of this can be taken for granted. In the UK in recent years, as in much of the world, there has been a dangerous roll back of rights and growing levels of homophobia and transphobia, amid poisonous rhetoric from politicians and the media. As always, the protection and expansion of rights and freedoms requires constant vigilance and constant struggle.

END.

Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

Thanks so much to Amina and to Silvia for their help in writing this.

Now wealth tax economists are becoming household names, and people are marching in the street calling for taxes named after them!

Sure, among ordinary people there was widespread support. But the tide is turning among governments, mainstream economists and the media.

The idea that the rich should be taxed more was routinely dismissed as either extreme or unworkable - or both. Not so anymore.

In this week’s Bulletin, we’re going back to our roots and giving people some scope for hope. We’re winning the fight to tax the super-rich.

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Progress towards a wealth tax on the super-rich

Already being introduced. Just in the last few years, wealth taxes on the super-rich have been introduced or strengthened in Colombia, Norway, Spain, Tunisia, Argentina and Bolivia.

New proposals are popping up everywhere. In California, a state in the Western United States, voters will decide in November if the super-rich should pay a one-off 5% wealth tax. In Denmark, the Prime Minister of the party that abolished the country’s wealth tax 30 years ago just ran an election campaign on the promise to reintroduce the tax.

Multilateral shifts. The G20 under Brazil called for international coordination to tax billionaires. A binding tax convention currently being negotiated at the UN recognizes that countries need to work together to make sure that the super-rich are taxed more effectively.

Come a long way. It is difficult to understand just how seismic these shifts are without comparing them to what came before. In past decades, a relentless war on fair taxation led country after country to repeatedly cut taxes on the rich.

Wealth taxes were decimated. For example, in 1990 there were 12 OECD countries that had a wealth tax on the richest. In just three decades, that number collapsed to three. Meanwhile billionaire wealth has skyrocketed from 2.5% of global GDP in 1990 to 14.1% today.

Taxes on the income of the rich slashed. From 1980 to 2022 the top tax rate on the income of the richest fell from 59.5% to 40.4% – a drop of nearly a third. In the same period, the income of the richest 1% increased by 45%.

Offset by taxing everyone else. While taxes on the rich were being dismantled, taxes on everyone else were being raised. Today, whenever 1 dollar is raised in taxes, only 8 cents are raised from taxes on the wealth of the rich, while nearly 33 cents are raised from inequality-enhancing consumption taxes.

Trickle up economics. Tax cuts for the rich were made with promises that the gains would eventually trickle down through jobs, investments and growth, but research shows what most people already suspect: the only beneficiaries were the rich, while growing inequality harmed our democracy, climate and progress against poverty and hunger.

We’re now (cautiously) winning. As we continue to fight against those waging the war on fair taxation, we are hopeful that we are finally winning. In the age of the first trillionaire, it’s not a minute too soon.

What is giving you hope? Comment below.

Leave a comment

Something to read/listen to

Read Who wants to tax a billionaire? A light-hearted guide to the tax the rich characters. We love the idea of rebranding killer stats as statistical rage bait!

Read about how South Korea plans to tackle inequality by establishing a future fund using extra tax revenue generated by the semiconductor boom.

Watch Jayati Ghosh on why we must move beyond growth.

Watch How to get filthy rich with Gary Stevenson (only available in the UK).

Watch Patriotic Millionaire’s new wealth tax campaign video.

Read Growth, Democracy, or Climate Action? The new trilemma of advanced capitalism. We love the conclusion of degrowth for the rich, green growth for the rest.

Food crises were not a single event for us. They were a rhythm. A bad rain, then a thin harvest, then a hard season, then, if we were fortunate, recovery. Then the cycle again. The sky set the rhythm, but the sky was never the whole story. Communities like mine had little cushion against a bad year, and how much cushion a community holds is not decided by the weather. In a household already stretched thin by that rhythm, birth order was never neutral. I was the first child of a polygamous family, and that came with a role attached, not just a place in the line. I was watched to see what example I would set. I was expected, before long, to help carry the household. When the harvest was thin, a firstborn child was among the first hands a family would call on, not the last.

A firstborn child is not asked if they have time to help. They are simply expected to have made it.

That is the direction my life could easily have taken. Fetching water. Looking after younger siblings. Working land that needed hands more than it needed a child at a school desk. What kept me at that desk, more days than not, was a bowl.

At school, once a day, we were given a ration through a World Food Programme feeding programme. Almost none of it came from our own fields or even our own country. Bowls like mine were filled with what international food aid shipped in those years: a porridge of sorghum, maize or wheat, a protein supplement, and oil for calories. What I remember is the powdered milk, mixed with water, and the dried, salted fish, broken into small pieces over the grain. I did not know, then, what WFP stood for. I knew the smell of the fish and the particular chalky taste of the milk, and I knew that bowl was often the most certain meal of my day.

Except on the days there was no school. We hated Sundays. We hated public holidays. No school meant no rations, so a day off was not a rest. It was a gap. I did not have the language then to call that irony. I only had the hunger of a Monday morning that felt, strangely, like relief.

We did not long for the day off. We longed for it to end.

That gap taught me something before I had a word for it. Some days, a system outside my family decided whether I ate. Not shameful. Not undignified. Just a plain, physical fact, and one that gave my family a reason to let me carry my share of the household from a desk, rather than from a field.

I say this because I know how the debate about aid usually goes. Someone points to what it has fed, vaccinated, taught, and cured. Someone else points to the dependency it can create, the power it concentrates in the giver, and the conditions that can arise without anyone asking to sign them. Both are right, and both are talking about the same bowl from different distances. From where I sat, seven or eight years old, waiting for a Sunday to end, the debate about power and dependency was not wrong. It simply was not the question in front of me. The question before me was whether I would eat that day or wait until Monday.

A system can need deep reform and still keep a child fed. Both things can be true at once.

Let me be clear about what follows from that, because in a season of aid cuts, it is easily twisted. The answer to an imperfect bowl is not an empty one. Taking the ration away reforms nothing. It only returns the hunger. When I question how aid works, I am not arguing for less of it. I am arguing about who decides.

I carry that bowl with me now, in a very different seat, in conversations about funding models, partnership terms and the language we use for the work we do. It keeps me honest about two things at once.

First, that reform is not betrayal. Questioning how aid is designed, who decides its terms, and where the power sits, is not an insult to the people it once fed. It is a way of asking whether the next firstborn child gets to stay at their desk without carrying the costs my generation carried alongside that bowl: the waiting, the conditions, the sense that help always arrived from somewhere else, decided by someone else. Even the food in the bowl had made that journey.

Second, that reform without memory becomes its own kind of distance. It is easy, from a table far from any child, to speak of aid only as a system to be fixed or replaced. It is harder and more honest to remember it has also been someone’s bowl. Somewhere, right now, it still is. Some child, somewhere, is dreading Sunday for the same reason I did.

That is the real distance in this story. Not the miles the food travelled to reach my bowl, but the distance between a table where a decision is made and a child who eats, or does not, because of it.

Some of that distance has begun to close. School meals are increasingly bought from farmers near the schools they serve, so that the bowl feeds a community twice. That is the right direction. The question is why, fifty years after my bowl, it is still the direction and not yet the norm.

We do not have to choose between gratitude and criticism. I hold both. Grateful for a scoop of milk that bought me time at a desk. Clear that the next child deserves a bowl that is filled more fairly, and decided closer to home.

The bowl was never the whole answer. But it was enough of one, for one child, more days than not. That has to count for something, even as we build something that no longer asks a child to dread the day off.

END

References

• The Sahel drought, 1968–74: widespread famine and displacement across Mauritania, Mali, Chad, Niger, and Burkina Faso, with an estimated 100,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of people dependent on food aid.

Author: Adama Coulibaly is the Head of Programs at Oxfam International. He also write and speak on decolonisation, leadership, and the future of global development.

Listen to our latest episode with Olivier De Schutter as we explore whether we can end poverty without GDP growth.

In this episode, we speak with Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, about his groundbreaking roadmap to end poverty without relying on endless GDP growth. Drawing on years of country visits and a global collaboration involving hundreds of economists, academics, unions and civil society organizations, Olivier argues that governments have become trapped by an obsession with growth at the expense of people’s wellbeing.

Together, we unpack why rising GDP hasn’t stopped inequality from deepening, how extreme wealth concentration is undermining democracy, why “business-friendly” policies often leave people behind, and what a post-growth economy focused on meeting human needs could actually look like.

Join us for a conversation that challenges one of the biggest assumptions in economics and offers a bold vision for a fairer future.

This is the first episode in a two-part EQUALS series exploring some of the most ambitious ideas for building a fairer and more sustainable future. Next, we’ll examine the World Inequality Lab’s groundbreaking Global Justice Report, speaking with members of the team behind the report about their bold proposals to transform the global economy and confront inequality, climate change and global injustice.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

Take a moment with the number. A trillion dollars. If you spent a million dollars every single day, it would take you two thousand seven hundred years to spend it. It is more than the entire GDP of Argentina or Nigeria. It is a figure so large that our brains are not really equipped to process it as a real thing.

According to Oxfam 60% of billionaire wealth globally is not earned in any sense you and I would recognise, but derived from inheritance, monopoly power, or crony connections. By UBS’s own count, the great wealth transfer is accelerating, with a record $297.8 billion passing to just 91 heirs in 2025. Musk’s own wealth did not surge through some new invention, but through a private-market revaluation of SpaceX and his AI company xAI, a paper merger that pushed his net worth from $500 billion to $800 billion in just four months. Tesla, the engine of much of his wealth, runs on public subsidy, tax incentives and regulatory frameworks his own companies have spent years bending into shape. The money does not materialise from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidised, and that the public is now invited to applaud.

Earlier this year while his companies held billions in government contracts, Musk was inside the US government running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE fired the regulators, hollowed out agencies, and dismantled the oversight structures that might otherwise have asked awkward questions of his own companies. A Yale model estimated Musk’s political activities cost Tesla between one million and 1.26 million US vehicle sales. He took that hit and kept going, which tells you what the access was worth to him. This is regulatory capture as a business model, dressed up as a public service.

But this is not about one man and his excessive wealth. It is systemic, and the same pattern recurs across every region. In South Africa, the Gupta brothers spent years so deeply embedded in Jacob Zuma’s government that a judicial commission concluded the state itself had been captured, with cabinet appointments and contracts steered to serve private interests. In India, Gautam Adani built one of the world’s great fortunes in lockstep with his proximity to Narendra Modi, winning state contracts and infrastructure concessions as his net worth soared, while those who called it crony capitalism were brushed aside. In Mexico, Carlos Slim became one of the richest men on earth almost overnight when the Salinas government privatised the state telephone monopoly and sold it to him, handing a public asset to a private fortune that has dominated the country’s telecoms ever since. Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and where they do not hold office outright, they buy the people who do. When wealth concentrates at this velocity, democracy is revealed as a sham.

Meanwhile the world that produced this wealth continues as it is. The World Inequality Report drawing on the work of 200 researchers found that the poorest half of humanity holds barely 2% of global wealth while fewer than 60,000 people at the very top control three times as much as that entire bottom half combined. This cannot be separated from the Musk wealth story. The systems that funnel money upward at this speed are the same systems that underfund public health, load poor countries with debt they cannot escape, and leave communities without the basics that governments once treated as obligations.

You will be told, as you always are, that taxing extreme wealth is complicated, that capital flees, that redistribution is a blunt and dangerous tool. These arguments are made by people who would be taxed more. A wealth tax sufficient to fund universal healthcare and education across the Majority World has been modelled, costed, and proposed repeatedly. The obstacle has never been the arithmetic. It has always been the politics, and the politics is owned by the people the tax would affect.

But here is what the first trillionaire does not want you to notice. Across the same world that produced his fortune, the 99% are organising. Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker recorded more than 110 major anti-government protests across 70 countries in the last year. Most of them powered by the same anger at the same rigged system.

Young people forced a tax climbdown in Kenya, brought down governments in Nepal and Madagascar and took to the streets from Morocco to Indonesia demanding the rules be rewritten. They did it without trillion-dollar war chests. They did it themselves, alongside people like you and me, in solidarity, and an insistence that this is not inevitable.

That movement is the counterweight to everything this moment represents. Billionaires are feeling the pressure. In May, Jeff Bezos went on CNBC to insist the tax system isn’t crony capitalism, defend his peers against ‘vilification,’ and deny that the ultra-rich avoid tax at all, the sound of a class that suddenly feels the need to argue its case in public.

Every wealth tax now argued seriously in a parliament, every billionaire levy being debated at the UN, every debt cancellation demand making it onto a government agenda arrived there because people organised and refused to accept the terms being set for them from above. The 1% have the money and, for now, control of the politics. The 99% have the majority, the moral case, and a growing refusal to be distracted from who is actually picking their pockets.

12 June may be the day the first trillionaire is officially minted, but, let it also be the moment millions more people decide they have had enough.

END.

Author: Ed Pomfret, Communications & media lead, Fight Inequality Alliance.

This article was first published by Fight inequality Alliance here and on their Substack. It has also been republished by Inequality.org here.

Fight Inequality Alliance

What a trillion dollars tells us about who really runs the world

SpaceX filed paperwork last week for the largest stock market listing in history, seeking $80 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, and analysts have pencilled in 12 June as the day Elon Musk officially becomes a trillionaire…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · Fight Inequality Alliance

A revolutionary, racist, and revolting idea

A core idea on the right is that of the ”Great Replacement Theory”―that so called ‘globalist elites’ in charge of rich countries are deliberately seeking to undermine, reduce, and ultimately replace white people. Related to this is the concept of remigration, which refers to the mass deportation of non-white immigrants, regardless of their citizenship status.

Remigration as an idea began circulating in the early 2010’s but did not really break through until 2023-24. It is now well and truly in the mainstream and has been backed by far-right leaders across the EU, US, and beyond, parties who are either in government or leading in the polls. Relatively suddenly, the horrific, disgusting idea of the mass deportation of people because they are not white has become normalised.

Hayek had no friends for years

Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of neoliberalism, was a very lonely man for a long time. His ideas were deemed so revolutionary, so entirely out of step with the mainstream, that he struggled somewhat to get a job in any university.

To his huge credit, that never stopped him fighting for what he thought was right. I really wish he had given up. Yet he kept plugging away, fighting for what he thought was right, and what he thought should happen in the world. His ideas went on to become some of the most influential and of the last forty years.

A tale of two Frenchmen

The French economist, Gabriel Zucman has had extraordinary success in pushing to normalise the need to tax the super-rich. His main proposal is that the super-rich pay taxes equivalent to 2% of their wealth each year.

Conversely, his mentor and friend Thomas Piketty, together with the team at the World Inequality Lab, are calling for a tax on billionaires of 20%, in their recent Global Justice Report. (Zucman actually made this point too in his brilliant book with Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice- saying that if the aim is to reduce inequality and deconcentrate wealth we need a rate of 10%, not 2%.)

These are of course two very different proposals- one moderate, one revolutionary. One would raise a lot of money for good things; one would eliminate billionaires in twenty years.

The question is do they conflict or are they complimentary?

Debates within Oxfam

A few years ago, our annual inequality paper, published for Davos, was called ‘Survival of the Richest’, and that year focused on the urgent need to tax the super-rich. When writing it we had to decide what we were going to call for ―what kinds of taxes and at what level.

Starting from first principles, we all agreed that we needed tax rates that were not just going to raise money, but that were actually going to reduce the level of wealth inequality in the world, not just slow its increase.

We did the numbers and found that rates of around 17% would achieve this. But then the debates began. We could not, many believed, call for such high rates of wealth taxation. These were pie in the sky. We would be “laughed out of the room.” Whilst we modelled what this would do to billionaire wealth, we in the end decided not to call for such high rates.

My own view is that as Oxfam, we should have, and that by doing so we should have pushed the boundaries of what was possible, in turn making the brilliant proposals of Zucman seem like the more palatable ones to politicians and decision makers. That by demanding these high rates we would be firstly demanding what was actually required to end the evils of extreme wealth concentration, and secondly stretching the bounds of what was politically possible and practical.

Laughed out of whose room?

Over the years, working on different topics, I have regularly heard that expression, ‘we will be laughed out of the room.’ For me it is quite revealing of a specific understanding of how change happens in the world, and one I think is wrong.

For a start, it presupposes that we are in the “room” in the first place. We are sometimes. It has happened to me a handful of times in my life. I remember working with Gordon Brown when he was UK Prime Minister with my colleague Anna, helping them create a plan to fund free healthcare in a series of countries in Africa. It was truly exhilarating ―every advocate’s dream. The plan was implemented, and millions of people got free public healthcare as a result.

But these moments are very few and growing fewer still.

The other thought behind this view is that we are in those rooms because of our moderate, technical and sensible proposals, and that conversely, if we start calling for radical, revolutionary things, we will not be invited back into the room again.

Demanding the stars

I really don’t agree with this. In fact, I think it is the opposite. That unless you demand the stars, you have no chance of getting the moon. If you go into the room with a sensible, technical proposal to go to the moon, then you will never leave the Earth.

Together with many others, we campaigned for years to make the case that healthcare should be free. That charging user fees for public healthcare, as insisted on by the World Bank at the time, contributed to killing huge numbers of people each year, denying healthcare to babies, to pregnant mothers, to the elderly. Together we built that room.

It is my strong belief that radical proposals are not just the right ones, but also by far the most tactical and strategic. They do not conflict with moderate ones. They create the space for them.

This is what the right do- their horrible, radical, and racist proposals do not prevent them becoming more powerful. They do not stop them being influential or being listened to. Quite the opposite- they build a new, racist room, that we all then have to operate in.

Conversely calling for moderate proposals on their own, without radical ones, is I think dangerous. It closes the space of possibility as politicians will often see them not as moderate but instead the outer edge of what is being demanded. It shrinks the room. Zucman agrees; his view is that his practical proposals are made more, rather than less likely to happen because of Piketty’s more radical ones.

Sticking only to moderate, technical proposals also stops us being able to do what the left is best at, which is tell a story of a radically more wonderful society for everyone. This in turn I think undermining our chances of success. I think it is no coincidence that the number of rooms is shrinking fast.

Our future is real. Theirs is a confidence trick

Radical ideas, expressed in ways that mobilise millions of people and make them emotionally commit to a different future, are what I think truly changes the world. They shift the whole understanding of what is politically “practical.”

I also think that as progressives, we have an advantage here, as our vision for a different world is inherently attractive to virtually everyone. No hunger, no poverty. An end to climate breakdown, a wonderful planet preserved forever. High quality public healthcare, education and housing for everyone. Less work, more happiness, more trust, more community, more caring for one another.

For the right, they constantly have to make a world that is only really attractive to the richest sound attractive to everyone. Hayek was very good at this, focusing on the universal desire for freedom from tyranny, and individual choice, and using that to promote a system where freedom was only really for the rich.

But it is very hard for them. The vision of a white Europe, free from anyone whose skin colour is different, or whose origins were in another continent, is not one that is positive or has wide appeal ―its main motivation is hatred and fear, not love.

It helps to have the billionaire owned media on your side, but it remains a constant confidence trick. The constant need to convince people that something would be good for them that wouldn’t, or that their troubles are the fault of x, y, or z rather than the rich and powerful, rather than presenting a genuine, positive and exciting vision of the future.

Building your own room

For me, our job, in the NGO, campaigning and advocacy world, is to focus mainly on building a new room, and then constantly pushing to expand it. Just like the vicious visionaries who dreamt up the dystopian “Great Replacement Theory” and came up with the idea of remigration. They weren’t trying to get into someone else’s room with moderate, ‘sensible’ proposals.

I was privy to an argument once between two of my bosses very early in my career. The debate between them was whether we should be calling for a pause in the bombing of Afghanistan to enable humanitarian aid to be delivered. One of my bosses said to the other, with a quiet fury, ‘The trouble is, X, if this were the campaign against slavery you would have us calling for more comfortable boats.’

This is what happens when you end up fighting in somebody elses room- instead we must always build our own one.

END.

Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

In this episode, Nafkote Dabi and speak with Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, a Widjabul Wia-bal woman, climate justice advocate, and one of Australia’s leading campaigners for First Nations rights.

Drawing on her experience working across Indigenous justice, refugee rights, and climate advocacy, Larissa explores how structural racism continues to drive economic inequality for Indigenous peoples, not only in Australia but around the world.

From the fight to reclaim January 26 as a day of truth-telling, to the growing influence of far-right politics, climate negotiations, and the challenge of building genuinely community-led movements, Larissa explains why inequality cannot be separated from questions of race, history, and power.

The conversation also examines what meaningful inclusion really looks like, why Indigenous peoples are rights holders rather than stakeholders, and how building broad coalitions for justice may be essential to confronting today’s intersecting crises.

If we want a fairer economy, Larissa argues, we must first reckon with the systems that continue to exclude those on the frontlines of inequality.

Larissa Baldwin-Roberts is a Widjabul Wia-bal woman from the Bundjalung Nations and a leading advocate for First Nations justice and climate action. A veteran campaigner and community organiser, she is the co-founder of Seed and Common Threads.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

Three months of the illegal U.S-Israel war against Iran have caused food, fuel and fertiliser prices to rocket, deepening debt pressure and pushing public services and humanitarian systems, already stretched beyond breaking point, to collapse.

The war doesn’t come in isolation. Since 2020, there have been at least five global-level shocks to the economic system. Each crisis compounds on top of the others, fuelling further inequality and suffering.

In this week’s Bulletin, we’re taking a stock check of who is benefiting and who is suffering from these compounding crises. Of course all of the estimates come with a high degree of uncertainty, which now hinges on whether the peace deal will hold. Regardless, there will be far-reaching consequences of the war.

Overlapping global crises…in numbers

1/ Soaring food prices. Food prices rose 3.4 times faster between February and April 2026 than during the same period last year. Before the war against Iran, 720 million people were already facing hunger. In March, the UN projected that if fighting continued until June, 45 million people will be pushed into extreme hunger. For women smallholder farmers —a huge share of food producers in the Global South— soaring fertiliser costs are a direct threat to their livelihoods.

2/ Vanishing aid. Between 2024 and 2025, G7 countries cut $48 billion from their aid budgets —a 29% drop, the largest decline in history. In 2025, 65% of UN humanitarian emergency plans went unfunded. The humanitarian aid G7 countries provided amounted to just 0.75% of their military spending in 2025. 44 people fell into a humanitarian emergency every minute since France last chaired the G7.

3/ The debt trap is set. 3.4 billion people now live in countries that spend more on sovereign debt interest than on healthcare or education. As US bond yields hit levels not seen since 2007, low- and middle-income countries that borrow in dollars face rising costs, too. Wealthy creditors win. Everyone else loses.

4/ Millions pushed into poverty. Before the war, the World Bank had projected global poverty would fall by 25.5 million people in 2026. Instead, the UNDP estimates the war will push more than 32.5 million into poverty by year’s end. The 2020s, already dubbed a “lost decade” on poverty reduction, are shaping up to be a golden era for the ultra-rich.

5/ War, who is it good for? Billionaires, as it turns out. Energy billionaires in G7 countries have pocketed $301 million per day since the US-Israel war against Iran began. Overall, billionaire wealth has surged by nearly $10 trillion across the fifth global economic shock since 2020. Energy billionaires alone have seen their wealth grow 14 times faster than billionaires overall.

6/…and Big Oil and fertiliser companies. The top six oil companies are on track to see profits surge 80% - or $68 billion - compared to pre-war forecasts. Six of the biggest fossil fuel firms are projected to earn $3,000 every second this year.

Three of the world’s biggest fertiliser corporations expect profits to jump 23% above pre-war forecasts. Fertilisers are now scarcer, and farmers across the Global South are being forced to plant less.

7/ Wealthy investors are doing well. More widely, the stock market has hit multiple highs in recent months. Major global financial institutions and banks are seeing profits surge amid heightened trading activity. UBS’ investment banking arm alone reported a 27% revenue jump in the first quarter of 2026 due to record trading activity. The wealthiest individuals control the stock market. In the US, the richest 1% own half of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares, while the bottom 50% hold just 1%. 85% of the world have no income from capital at all.

Something to read and listen to

Read Oxfam's briefing, “Ending Impunity and Inequality,” published ahead of the G7 in Evian.

The U.S-Israel war against Iran has inflicted significant damage on the world economy, and while the recently announced peace deal may ease immediate pressure, the fallout will linger. IMF officials have downgraded their 2026 global growth forecast from 3.3 percent to 3.1 percent, and warned that if the conflict persists, that growth rate could drop to as low as 2 percent.

For many countries in the Global South, the economic crisis is not a future risk but a present reality. Although the peace agreement may help over time, oil, gas, and fertilizer prices remain elevated and continue to drive up food and energy costs, straining hospital, school, and public infrastructure budgets. Governments already squeezed by record debt repayments are being pushed closer to default.

People living in poverty are bearing the highest costs, while many at the top are reaping huge gains. Wall Street investment banks, arms manufacturers, AI firms, and energy and fertilizer corporations are enjoying enormous profits as a result of war-related market volatility and militarization.

The G20, which touts itself as the world’s premiere forum for international economic cooperation, should be playing a central role. And in fact, their response to the 2008-2009 global financial crisis offers important lessons, both positive and negative. G20 member countries, which represent 85 percent of global GDP, showed that a coordinated crisis response is possible — but they also demonstrated the risks of recovery efforts that prioritize financial markets over people.

The G20’s Emergence

During the 2008 financial meltdown, G7 countries acknowledged that recovery required the involvement of rapidly growing economies like China, India, and Brazil, leading them to elevate the G20 from a forum of finance ministers and central bank governors into a leaders’ summit process. Over the course of three summits, G20 governments coordinated the largest synchronized fiscal and monetary stimulus in history, committing trillions of dollars through increased public spending, expanded IMF resources, trade finance, and measures aimed at supporting growth and debt sustainability in affected countries.

Beyond macroeconomic stability, labor organizations and civil society groups fought hard — and successfully — to shape the recovery agenda to include measures to protect jobs and livelihoods. The financial crisis eliminated an estimated 34 million jobs globally, but coordinated stimulus measures helped avert a far deeper, depression-level collapse.

The Limits of Finance-Focused Crisis Management

Despite these achievements, G20 country recovery efforts exposed the limits of a crisis strategy focused primarily on stabilizing financial markets. Moves to regulate the financial sector were remarkably timid. Proposals to tax banks and global financial markets through a Financial Transaction Tax, proposed by the UK at the G20, were quietly shelved — a move that would have brought in hundreds of billions of dollars while helping curb excessive speculation and financial risk taking, which remain persistent challenges today.

The G20’s initial commitment to coordinated stimulus quickly gave way to fiscal consolidation and austerity, particularly after the European sovereign debt crisis in 2010. Following the global financial crash, several countries in Europe faced rising borrowing costs and fears that they would default on their debts. In response, European governments and international institutions imposed sweeping austerity measures — deep cuts to public spending, wages, and social services, along with weakened labor rights — in exchange for financial support.

The shift toward austerity and deregulation marked a turning point in the global recovery. Many governments moved away from protecting jobs and public services, focusing instead on reducing deficits, weakening worker protections, and reassuring financial markets. As former TUAC General Secretary John Evans later observed, this premature turn to austerity “led to stalling of global growth and job creation.”

The long-term consequences are still visible today. The decade after the financial crisis saw rising wealth concentration, growing corporate power, stagnant wages, and deepening sovereign debts. While financial markets recovered, ordinary families around the world faced years of heightened economic insecurity and weakened public services.

Lessons for the G20 Today

The response to the 2008 crash showed that the G20 can act quickly and mobilize enormous resources when the global economy is under threat. But while governments moved rapidly to stabilize markets, they paid far less attention to the inequalities and structural vulnerabilities that made the crisis so devastating to everyday people. The premature shift to austerity and deregulation undermined many of the gains of the initial response.

The COVID-19 crisis provides an additional example. G20 countries showed some learning within their own borders by providing significant emergency aid to households and workers. But the response overall deepened global inequalities. Vaccine distribution was highly unequal and while advanced economics invested trillions in stimulus, low-income countries remained constrained by debt and credit downgrades. The allocation of $650 billion in Special Drawing Rights in 2021 provided vital liquidity, but this aid was allotted based on IMF quotas rather than need. Africa – home to 18% of the world’s population – received only 5 percent of the total.

Our 2025 report, The G20 at a Crossroads, produced jointly with analysts from Brazil, South Africa, the UK, and elsewhere, concludes that the G20 has at times been effective at “fighting fires,” but far less successful at addressing the underlying conditions that produce instability and inequality.

Those lessons matter today. The U.S.-Israel war against Iran has raged alongside climate disasters, debt distress, food insecurity, and precarious work — interconnected pressures within a global economy already shaped by profound inequalities.

The G20 response to these challenges should focus not merely on preventing a deeper economic shock, but also on protecting people and building long-term resilience. Success should be measured not just by GDP growth or market recovery, but by whether countries — especially in the Global South — can maintain healthcare systems, protect food security, improve conditions for working people, reduce sovereign debt burdens, and preserve fiscal space for public investment.

There is no scarcity of practical proposals for moving the G20 in this direction.

A global civil society statement organized by Eurodad, for instance, identifies measures to counter the current war-related crisis, including immediate debt payment suspension for affected countries, cancellation of all unsustainable and illegitimate debts, and a new allocation of Special Drawing Rights, an international reserve asset maintained by the IMF, for countries most in need of support.

A statement to G20 leaders by the L20 group of international trade unions lays out an agenda for guaranteeing rights and reducing inequalities in ways that would make the world more resilient in the face of current and future crises. For example, they call on G20 governments to adopt national living wage targets as well as public investment targets as a percentage of GDP to address climate change and ensure quality public health care and education.

At this moment of escalating economic crisis, the central challenge remains political will. The Trump administration, which holds the G20 presidency this year, has set out an agenda that prioritizes the interests of the wealthy and big corporations, even as global instability deepens. G20 leaders face a defining choice: follow this path and let the burden continue to fall on the most vulnerable, or seize this moment to transform the G20 into a body capable of addressing the structural inequalities and vulnerabilities that weaken the global economy and amplify the human cost of crises.

END.

Authors: Reyanna James is a research associate at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, DC. Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at IPS. Both are co-editors of Inequality.org and its related weekly newsletter.

This is the second entry in our new G20 In Flux blog series, unpacking the key issues shaping the US-led G20. Our first entry explores how powerful countries compete over critical mineral supplies and how Latin America is being reshaped through mining, exports corridors, and threats to Indigenous lands.

Subscribe now and follow the series as we explore what’s at stake for the global economy and beyond.

Simultaneously, more than 5,000 kilometers south of the U.S. capital in the Brazilian city of Santarém, located in the Amazon, hundreds of members of more than 15 Indigenous peoples were mobilizing together in protests and occupations. They were confronting two measures by the Lula government: a federal decree that opened the way for the privatization of Amazonian waterways, and the authorization for the dredging of the Tapajós River — one of the main rivers in the Amazon.

The dredging aimed to increase transport capacity for products like grains and minerals, favoring export corporations at the expense of the Indigenous river and riverside communities. The struggle lasted more than thirty days and led Indigenous peoples to occupy the facilities of a large U.S. company operating in the country, which is facing civil lawsuits in Brazil following reports of labor conditions analogous to slavery within its supply chain. The Indigenous mobilization succeeded and led the federal government to revoke both measures.

The protests in Santarém anticipate conflicts that are likely to deepen. Despite the physical distance, Washington and Santarém reveal two sides of the same coin: while powerful countries dispute control over critical minerals, Latin American territories are pressured to adapt to the needs of extraction and transport.

Latin America is at the forefront of the race among countries and corporations to secure natural resources. The region is responsible for 35% of global lithium production, concentrating more than half of the reserves of this mineral in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. Brazil alone has the largest known reserves of rare earths outside of China.

The infrastructure works contested by Indigenous people in Santarém are part of a broader Brazilian federal agenda of construction, privatization, and improvement of export routes still underway. The data are alarming: there are requests to explore critical minerals in areas surrounding more than 270 Indigenous lands, or 44% of these territories nationwide, and may affect 31 Quilombola^[1] territories, equivalent to 24% of the Quilombola area in the Legal Amazon^[2].

A recent report published by the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB, in Portuguese) is revealing. It details the pressure created by mining companies’ lobbying in the country and shows how mining interests have penetrated across all three branches of government, under the guise of energy transition, sovereignty, and sustainable development^[3].

Latin America’s immense resource wealth has made it a priority for U.S. foreign policy. Trump has resorted to direct military interventions, supporting right-wing governments, and pressuring countries directly, as in the case of the Panama Canal, where Panama’s Supreme Court reversed a concession previously granted to a Chinese company following Trump’s repeated claims that China was controlling the canal. Another recent episode was the purchase of the largest known rare earth reserve in Brazil, Serra Verde, by a U.S. company backed by the Trump administration. The region is also subject to Chinese influence. China is the main export destination of several countries in the region^[4] and has financed and operated key infrastructure projects, such as the Chancay megaport in Peru, which has faced allegations of regulatory and environmental irregularities.

New South American infrastructure projects bring back old questions about dependency, development, and regional integration.

For example, the South American Integration Routes, designed by the Brazilian government with other governments in the region, foresee five routes connecting the continent’s interior to Pacific ports. Although presented as integration and development, these works may reaffirm the region’s agrarian and extractive dependency by privileging the transport of grains, minerals, and other raw materials. They also raise questions about the viability of some routes and their impacts on Indigenous territories, not only in Brazil, but also in neighboring countries such as Paraguay. Once again, development appears as a promise. But development for whom? Under what parameters?

In this context, it is worth turning to an observation from a recent Oxfam panel, Beyond America First: U.S. International Economic Policy in a Multipolar World: the contradiction that Global South governments risk, under a discourse of anti-imperialism or nationalism, ending up defending policies that benefit local oligarchies and deepen national inequality. This warning helps us think beyond rhetoric, and instead ask what is the actual content of the policy and which sectors are affected by it.

In Latin America, these questions become urgent, especially given that imperialism also relies on local elites and other non-government actors. The advance of mining, infrastructure, and export corridors threatens to deepen violence against Indigenous peoples, riverside communities, Quilombola lands, workers, and poor populations. It also poses an environmental threat, given the Amazon’s essential role in regulating the global climate system. This is not a distant risk, but a process already underway. It is not enough to denounce foreign intervention, while projects presented as development extract wealth from these territories.

The mobilization in Santarém shows the strength of Indigenous resistance, but also the scale of the struggle ahead. Indigenous peoples have succeeded, yet remain largely alone in a complex scenario shaped by U.S. and Chinese interests, local elites, and a Brazilian government that presents this model as development. Supporting these struggles is therefore not secondary. Building common forms of defense with the people on the front line of this offensive is an indispensable part of any consistent anti-imperialism.

END.

^[1] Territories of Black communities whose history is rooted in resistance to slavery and whose struggle today centers on collective land rights, memory, and ways of life.

^[2] The Legal Amazon is a political-administrative concept used by the Brazilian government for public policy purposes and as a reference for deforestation measures. It encompasses an area larger than the Amazon biome itself and corresponds to about 59% of Brazilian territory.

^[3] In the Legislative branch, the report traces this offensive through bills that seek to weaken environmental licensing and Indigenous territorial rights; in the Judiciary, through disputes in the Supreme Court over the interpretation of Indigenous rights and “national interest”; and, in the Executive, through federal plans, programs and regulatory bodies that frame mining as public interest and national development.

^[4] According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) data, in 2024 China was the main destination for exports from Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Peru.

Author: Daphnae Picoli is a political economist. She holds a MA in Economic Development from the Unicamp (Brazil) and is currently a PhD candidate in Economics at the same institution.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Oxfam.

This is the first entry in our new G20 In Flux blog series, unpacking the key issues shaping the US-led G20. Subscribe now and follow the series as we explore what’s at stake for the global economy and beyond.

To contextualise this further, Musk is now $300 billion wealthier than 3.8 billion people in the world. If he were a country and his wealth were the GDP, the one-person Republic of Musk would be the 20th-largest economy in the world. If he were to spend $1 million per day, it would take him more than 3,280 years to exhaust his wealth. One of my friends said that for him losing $10 in one night would be a disaster for him. Feels like a joke, but not for billions of people.

In 2024, my colleagues and I at Oxfam projected that we would see the first trillionaire in a decade. We did not think it would happen quite as fast, but it’s no surprise to those of us who have been following and speaking about the dangerous inequality explosion.

Since the turn of this decade, we have seen a massive concentration of wealth at the top. In nominal terms, i.e. not adjusted for inflation, the world’s billionaires’ wealth is now 2.5 times higher than at the start of 2020, having grown from $8 trillion to more than $20.1 trillion as of 12 June 2026, according to data from the Forbes billionaires list.

Too much wealth and power in a few people

Just imagine what such wealth in the hands of a few people can do to the world. For a start, it can buy influence and political power. Politicians will do your bidding, and government policies can easily be used to appease you. The media – even if not under your full ownership and control (although much of it may be)- will be paying attention to every word you say, and the world will be keenly following it.

That could mean influencing an election in some distant land, sowing division and deciding what people talk about and how. These are not hypothetical examples: seven of the top 10 biggest media companies in the world are owned by billionaires.

No person should have such a massive amount of wealth-it’s too corrosive. Too dangerous.

Trillionaires and extreme poverty in the same world

Even as we get the first dollar trillionaire, the rest of the world is suffering. Globally, nearly 3.8 billion people are living in poverty, 2.3 billion lack enough food, and 3 billion people are facing a housing crisis. And governments are dealing with bankruptcies.

The ongoing war in the Middle East and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have set food and energy prices soaring, hitting workers and poor people, especially in the world’s poorest countries, the most. Extreme hunger and poverty are expected to rise.

While this is happening, the stock market has hit a record high, further cementing the wealth of the richest. It’s the irony of the world we are living in: too much suffering and too much pain for the majority and too much wealth for a few.

This inequality is because of bad policies

This massive accumulation of wealth is due to bad policies by governments, especially the powerful ones. Mega corporations and their wealthiest owners have enjoyed lower taxes, benefited from deregulation and government subsidies. Musk himself is a big beneficiary of the American taxpayers. This has enabled him to build his empire.

Oxfam’s research shows that about 60% of billionaires’ money is not merited. It has been gained through cronyism, monopoly, and inheritance - these are takers, not makers

It’s a free market for the rest of us and a welfare state for the richest. Nobody should lie to you that billionaires are the most hardworking, most innovative people in the world.

It’s time to tax the super-rich

Tackling wealth accumulation and investing in the common good, like healthcare and decent, affordable housing, is what governments should be doing. It requires decisiveness and bold policy.

A permanent wealth tax on the super-rich can help keep inequality in check, especially if it is designed in a progressive way where the rates paid by billionaires and trillionaires are far higher than for those that are ‘merely’ multi-millionaires or centi-millionaires. A much higher rate of tax would be needed to actually reduce inequality- last week the economist Thomas Piketty recommended a permanent tax on billionaires of 20%.

The money generated from such a tax could mean a lot to billions of people and governments. Just as a thought experiment, a one-off 10% tax on Musk’s $1.2 trillion dollars would raise $120 billion-enough to end extreme poverty in the world for a year. He would still be a trillionaire.

Any wealth tax should be accompanied by other measures, such as regulations to break up monopolies and oligopolies that hinder fair competition and exploit consumers, and stronger protections for workers’ rights.

Finally, governments must set up clear timebound targets to rapidly reduce inequality and monitor progress. They should aim for a Palma ratio of 1 or below- this means the top 10% would not earn more than the bottom 40%. That means that, on average, a person in the richest 10% will still be 4 times richer than someone in the bottom 40%. So far from perfect equality, but much better than today, where the richest 10% can be 5, or 10 times richer than the bottom 40%.

The world cannot afford trillionaires, or indeed billionaires, while the majority of people sleep hungry and tens of millions die from preventable diseases. Governments need to take bold action. And we citizens must demand they do the right thing.

END.

Author: Anthony Kamande is Inequality Research and Policy Advisor at Oxfam International.

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Abolishing billionaires

The report identifies extreme inequality and, in particular, the extreme concentration of wealth in the world as the core problem- giving too much unaccountable power to a tiny group of rich people and leaving the rest of the world impoverished. It proposes high taxes on wealth and income, not just to raise revenue, but to fundamentally reshape the economy from one based on private wealth to one based on the public good. They propose, for example, a 20% tax on billionaire wealth, which would reduce the number of billionaires to zero in a matter of decades and, in so doing, raise a huge amount of money to transform the world.

Campaigning for convergence

At the heart of the report is a radical and fundamental reduction in global inequality; under their plan, the gap between average incomes in the Global North and in the Global South (currently around 16 to 1) would be reduced to zero, so that average national incomes would converge on 60,000 euros per capita for every country in the world. The share of wealth held by the bottom 50% globally would rise from 2% to 30%, and the share held by the billionaire class would fall from 6% to 0.05%.

Class matters more than country

This vision is not primarily about rich nations and poor nations, though- it is fundamentally about rich people and the rest of us. At the national level, the recommendations also necessitate a dramatic compression in inequalities of income and wealth, down to a scale of 5 to 1 for income and 10 to 1 for wealth. Every country will become radically more economically equal, which will bring big benefits to the majority in rich countries too.

Only reducing inequality can deliver a future for both people and planet

Absolutely core to their vision is constructing a global economy that can deliver prosperity for all, but still achieve the rapid decarbonisation needed to keep emissions within relatively safe limits of 1.8 degrees. This is in contrast to an absolutely disastrous 4 degrees of warming that they project under current policies of persistent inequality and slow decarbonisation. Their report shows most powerfully that politically the only way to save the planet is to, at the same time, massively reduce inequality.

Not degrowth but very different growth

Central to this is a dramatic reshaping of the economy. They do not come out in full support of degrowth but do support dramatic degrowth in some parts of the economy. They model a huge shift from the material sectors like manufacturing and construction to more immaterial factors, with global working hours dedicated to education and health rising from 11% today to 43% by 2100. We will all work less too, with the average number of working hours halved- this labour hours reduction in turn reduces carbon emissions. We will work less but have a better life because inequality will be massively reduced, and many things like health will be decommodified, provided free and universally.

From Private Profit to Public Power- the return of public wealth

Public wealth, that is wealth held by governments, has declined sharply in recent decades. Many governments are now net debtors. This has happened as private wealth has increased rapidly. In fact, the two things are closely linked as governments took on debt and printed trillions of dollars in new money to cope with the financial crisis of 2009 and the Covid-19 calamity- this in turn has sharply increased asset prices and private wealth. The Piketty Plan will see public wealth return to being 30% of total wealth, as it was around 1980. This is critical, as public wealth can be deployed democratically to transform the way things work deliberately, unlike private wealth, where profit is the only real incentive.

(Almost) everyone will benefit

All this means that 89% of the world will see their incomes double by 2100, with 95% gaining in the Global South and 85-95% in the Global North. When the benefits of greater leisure time and a rescued and revived planet are considered, over 99% of humanity will be better off.

A Global Justice Fund

The huge investment this will require will be paid by taxing the world's super-rich and using this to capitalise a new ‘Global Justice Fund’ which would reach 10.3% of world GDP on average. This would be a new global institution; one they propose would be ruled by a democratic system of double majority; all decisions would be approved by 55% of countries representing 60% of the world’s population. This will replace the ‘Global Plutocracy’ of the IMF and World Bank, where it is one dollar, one vote.

Want to pay for that in Euros, or in UN’s?

They also propose a new UN currency, which could be used by countries as their reserve currency, instead of the dollar and other ‘hard currencies’ like the euro, used today. At the moment, this gives the countries with those currencies a huge structural advantage, as they can borrow at much lower rates. It also leads to very large global economic imbalances, with a trillion dollars each year moving from south to north, and to the richest 1% in the global north in particular. Whilst they are most in favour of raising resources from taxing the global super-rich, further money could then also be raised to support the transformation by issuing the UN Currency, similar to the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.

An equally divided pie in the sky?

Maybe, but they do lay out ways this plan could begin to happen politically, even if the world’s biggest economies refuse to take part. They point to similar radical, but peaceful reductions in inequality in many countries in the past. But political feasibility is not the main aim of this report. Instead, it is to describe, with concrete numbers and analysis, what a radically equal and climate breakdown-beating future could look like. In doing so, it is very successful. Ideas and visions of a positive future are vital to mobilise. We need things to fight for, and not just fight against, and the Piketty Plan is certainly one worth fighting for.

Read the report

Something to read/listen to

Read Branko’s new research on how the share of capital income – “unearned income” that does not require working – has increased in most countries.

Read about The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth from the UN rapporteur De Shutter.

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I was confronted with my own lack of awareness about why such vast inequality exists between the Global North and the Global South. I also realised that, as a company, we had not engaged in a meaningful way with Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is arguably the most under-fulfilled human right of them all, affecting billions of our fellow human beings:

‘Everybody has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family …’

I reached out to Jason Hickel, and we had many long conversations. Jason previously worked in international development and was a passionate believer in the narrative of aid as the solution to global inequality. But once he started digging, that belief was shaken to its core. Those conversations are what finally led me to write a play called “A Fine Idea.” The play looks at human rights in a more expansive way, drawing our attention to the structural drivers of an extreme status quo. I wanted to explore whether theatre could help audiences engage with ideas traditionally confined to economics books, policy papers and academic conferences.

Much of the action takes place in Kenya during the June 2024 Gen Z uprising. This historic mobilisation saw massive numbers of (mostly) young Kenyans take to the streets to demand that the Finance Bill 2024 be rejected and not passed into law. Crucially, these young protesters were explicitly joining the dots between proposed sweeping domestic tax hikes, including on basic goods like bread and cooking oil, and the rigid conditionalities attached to International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. What began as peaceful protests turned deadly; scores of young Kenyans were killed by police, many were abducted, and some remain missing.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. This youth-led resistance represents a tectonic shift echoing across the Global South. In recent years, from Kenya to Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Morocco, Madagascar and Indonesia, a new generation is rising. They are refusing to accept the suffocating logic of austerity imposed from afar.

Conversations with Kenyan activists and experts, including the incredible Wanjira Wanjiru have deepened our understanding of these protests and the profound economic questions surrounding them. While most people in the Global North view the Bretton Woods institutions as positive or neutral, Wanjira pulled no punches when we asked for her perspective, describing them as “a cancer within our continent.”

What made me write this play is not simply the scale of global inequality, but how normalised it has become. We treat poverty, debt and inequality as facts of life rather than the consequences of economic systems shaped by political choices. “A Fine Idea” is an attempt to open up that conversation and ask whether a different future is possible.

END.

For those interested in exploring these questions further, “A Fine Idea” will run at the Arcola Theatre in London from 11 June to 4 July. EQUALS podcast subscribers can access £15 tickets using the code 15JO. I’d love to see you there ―and please share these details with anyone who might want to join the conversation.

On the final performance on 4 July, will join us for a post-show discussion to explore the themes of “The Divide” and the wider questions of global inequality raised by the play, followed by an audience Q&A.

Author: Christine Bacon is the Co-Artistic Director of ice&fire theatre and the writer of the play “A Fine Idea.” She is also trustee of the Student Action for Refugees.

Listen to our latest episode with Guy Standing on the profit-churn approach of modern education, inequality, basic income, and how to reclaim common goods.

Me and my colleagues Maaza and Anthony with Uncle Ho

Living beyond means

It is quite common, certainly in my experience, for leaders in countries to set as their goal the country as a whole moving forward out of a particular income bracket by a certain date, whether it is moving from low to lower-middle income, or from lower to upper middle income, or finally moving up to become a high income country.

In some ways this is totally understandable as it is a simple way of delineating progress. But countries are not individuals, who are either rich or poor or somewhere in between. They are collections of millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of people with individual lives, aggregated in very different ways.

These country income thresholds, set by the World Bank, have a huge impact and influence. Access to different levels of support, whether it is grants or concessional lending from donors, is strongly linked to them.

But ultimately, they are averages, and averages are of limited use, especially in situations of high inequality, which is more likely than not the case in most countries of the Global South.

Equatorial Guinea for example, was a high-income country between 2007 and 2014. It has now slipped back into upper middle income. At one point during the euro crisis, it briefly had a higher per capita income than Spain. Yet throughout it has had infant mortality rates similar to Mozambique or Haiti and half the population live in poverty. Virtually all of its oil wealth has been captured basically by one ruling family.

Poverty in Equatorial Guinea

The ‘K’ shaped economy discussion

This tyranny of averages has become news recently because of the discussion of the ‘K’ shaped recovery in the USA. 49% of all US consumption is by the top 10% of incomes. Whilst the top is booming, and this carries through to the overall growth rates and usual performance measures of the economy, ordinary people are struggling.

The K shaped economy and recovery is a hot topic in the US but relevant everywhere

Many of the economic measures we use first came into being in the rich world after WW2, with the greater availability of standard and regular national accounting statistics. This coincided with a period in the rich world of low inequality, which could be one of the reasons why problems with relying on national averages were not really a big thing. Sometimes in fact the incomes at the bottom were growing faster than the top so averages underplayed the progress being made.

The country classifications, into low, middle, and high, were made up by the World Bank, becoming fully formalised in the late 1980s. From the beginning they were criticised, and alternative measures proposed, perhaps the most successful being the Human Development Index (which measures health and education outcomes as well as income but is still based on averages). Nevertheless, like GDP growth, these thresholds have taken on a political life of their own.

Learning from the success of Vietnam

I was lucky enough to be in Vietnam late last month, talking with academics, students and policy makers, organised by my wonderful colleagues in Oxfam in Vietnam. Vietnam has a huge amount to be proud of. It has witnessed rapid and uninterrupted growth in GNI per capita, rising almost fivefold between 1995 and 2024, whilst at the same time keeping inequality at a reasonable level. Vietnam has a medium level of inequality, at a Gini of 0.35, similar to Germany, and below the World Bank threshold for high inequality, which is a Gini of 0.4. This combination of relative equality and high growth has translated into the elimination of extreme poverty, and a far better life for the huge majority of Vietnamese.

Vietnam- rapid progress in per capita GNI with inequality remaining fairly level.

However, by some measures, especially those measures of top incomes and wealth, Vietnam is becoming more unequal. Also, their equality is largely a product of the way the economy is structured before government intervention (this is known as ‘market inequality’)- whilst there have been big investments in education and in health in recent years, the redistributive impact of taxation and government spending on inequality remains relatively limited.

The Vietnamese government have a very clear goal to reach high income status, and to do this with double digit growth. Our key discussion on the visit was that in doing this, they need to work very hard too to keep inequality at manageable levels. Looking at the experience of other countries in the region, they have a clear choice of the path ahead. In preparing for our visit, my amazing colleague Anthony pulled together these charts- the first compares China with Korea, which is quite startling- you can see Korea reached high-income status whilst constantly maintaining inequality at a medium level. China by contrast saw a huge leap in income inequality, going from being one of the world’s most equal countries to having high inequality, on a par with the USA. It was not just Korea either, but also countries like Japan, Taiwan, Thailand- all grew rapidly whilst keeping inequality at a reasonable level.

China and Korea- both had very rapid growth, but China GINI also rose very sharply

The second looks at Vietnam in comparison to four countries, Philippines, South Africa and Thailand.

Today the Philippines and Vietnam have very similar per capita average incomes, but poverty in the Philippines is three times higher because they have much higher inequality.

South Africa is upper-middle income, but famously also one of the most unequal countries in the world, so also remains with high levels of poverty. Conversely Thailand, which has broadly the same average income, has levels of poverty more than three times lower than South Africa.

In short, it is quite possible to grow at the same time as managing inequality at a good level, and ideally at a Gini below 0.3, the World Bank threshold for low inequality.

This has huge political implications, as the discussion in the USA shows. The K shaped economy thesis could equally explain why Gen Z protests exploded in high inequality Kenya, despite robust economic growth for years and a steady progress towards the government target of reaching upper middle-income status by 2030.

K is also for Kenya

If the majority of consumption is by those at the very top, then the economy, and the market is tailored towards them. The media often targets them as a result, and advertising definitely does by definition. Their lives dominate the films, the television we watch. It can sometimes feel like their lives are the only lives we know about or hear about. They are also much less exposed to rising food and energy prices. They also tend to be the ones in government and in power. It becomes rapidly a tale of two countries, and not one, and where the tale of the top is the only one that is told. This is I think not only a deeply unfair but also an unstable situation.

Ditching the averages

In short, using average incomes to define whether a country is poor or rich is convenient and easily understood, but it obscures as much as it illuminates. An average measure is useful broadly in proportion I would say to the level of inequality in a country, and in high inequality countries it is not very helpful at all. This is something that has long been the case in most of the Global South and is now once again becoming more the case in a number the rich countries of the Global North too.

We can start by much better and regular measurement of inequality too. Other combined measures, like the World Bank’s ‘prosperity gap’ measure are also very useful. There is no shortage of better ways to do this, and we need to use them.

It is time to live beyond means.

In this episode Max and Grazielle interview renowned economist Guy Standing, exploring his argument that the privatization of public goods or what he calls the “plunder of the commons” has produced a new global class, the Precariat, and fuelled rising inequality.

Guy explains why a basic income is a matter of common justice, freedom, and security, which are human rights. He further dives into his most recent book that describes how private equity and financialization have transformed schools and universities into profit machines, and why restoring the education system with slower, ethical, democratic learning matters for society.

From privatized education to the future of basic income, this episode is a timely conversation about inequality, insecurity, and what it will take to build systems that serve people instead of profit.

Guy Standing is a British labour economist. He is a Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University in London, and is a founding member and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). His latest book, Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons, focuses on the cost of education which focused solely on the building of human capital in preparation for the labour market.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

For the past twenty years, (too) slow progress has been made to increase aid effectiveness, based on key principles like recipient country leadership and a focus on ending poverty and reducing inequality. Over the past year, however, a long-simmering alternative paradigm has come to prominence. Known as “trade over aid” in the US, “from donor to investor” in the UK, or “Global Gateway” in the EU, it consists in two pillars: aid must now serve the “mutual interests” of both the donor and recipient country, and a primary goal of aid should be to leverage private finance. In other words, full rudder back to the bad old days of twentieth century neo-colonialism.

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Aid in numbers

Aid budgets plummet. Aid has fallen by 28% between 2023 and 2025. The United States is the biggest scrooge, but many other countries including France, Germany and the United Kingdom are to blame as well. They have announced further cuts through 2030.

Aid is peanuts. Aid budgets were never high to begin with. At its peak in 2023, aid represented only 0.37% of donors’ Gross National Income. Even that is inflated, as official aid statistics include things that don’t belong: host countries’ refugee costs (13% of total aid budgets), overseas students’ stipends, double-counted debt relief, and some subsidies to donors’ outward foreign investment.

Aid cuts kill. Based on aid’s past track record in fighting HIV-AIDS, malaria, malnutrition and other diseases, the Institute of Global Health in Barcelona estimates that projected aid cuts will kill about 9 million people by 2030.

Aid works. In addition to saving lives, aid has multiple other benefits. Over 35 million primary school children depend on it for their education, 14 million of whom are at risk of dropping out. Investing in conflict prevention costs 100 less than in crisis response. Aid boosts economic growth, such that 32 countries “graduated” from or outgrew World Bank aid.

People care. Public opinion in donor countries remains supportive of aid. While aid is not at the top of the public’s priorities at times of belt-tightening, that is in part due to people not realizing how small aid budgets actually are. And while there are lingering perceptions of waste – fed by overt lies – the right response to that is to double-down on the aid effectiveness agenda, not to turn its back on it.

Instrumentalized aid does not work. Aid is indirectly in the interest of donor countries, as they benefit from a more stable and prosperous world. However, experience has shown that when donors directly use aid budgets to push their own agendas onto partner countries, aid becomes less effective. If donor governments want to increase their own competitiveness or security, they should do so with separate budget lines.

There is another way: tax the rich. Over the past 12 months alone, billionaires have gained $4 trillion, bringing their wealth to $1.5 trillion more than that of the poorest half of humanity. Taxing the rich could raise $2.5 trillion annually, more than enough to end poverty in the world.

Thankfully not all donors are cutting or instrumentalizing aid. Denmark, Norway and Spain are among the few countries bucking the trend, although the latter has a way to go to reach the 0.7% of GNI budget target. We must remind all donor governments that this time of global crisis calls for more global solidarity, not less.

Something to read/listen to

Read Oxfam’s “Beyond the Targets” report that lays out an agenda to put aid back on track.

Listen to the latest episodes of the Equals podcast

Watch this new viral video from Patriotic Millionaires that explains extreme wealth inequality.

Read this journal article that shows that wealth inequality has a large negative effect on economic growth.

Read Zucman’s case for California’s billionaire tax in The New York Times.

Watch friend and colleague Kwesi Obeng being interviewed on “Are billionaires good for Africa?” based on Oxfam’s brilliant Africa inequality report from last year.

Watch Eurodad’s new series of stories and a film on the “true cost of debt,” stories coming out between May and October.