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.

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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.

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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.

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^[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.

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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, from 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. 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 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.

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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.

Now, sitting here in 2026, this feels mercifully calm. By my count, since 2020 we have had five global level shocks to the economic system. First was the impact of Covid itself on the global economy.

Second was the credit crunch that followed the pandemic as rich countries rapidly increased interest rates prompting further debt crises. Virtually simultaneous with this was the energy and food crisis that hit the globe after the Ukraine War. Fourth was the widespread economic disruption prompted by the actions of the second Trump administration; the sudden imposition of tariffs on the majority of countries, and the huge cuts to Official Development Assistance (ODA) that happened pretty much simultaneously. Now fifth is unlawful US and Israel war against Iran, which is creating a food and energy shock that may dwarf that of the Ukraine War.

Add to this a sixth crisis too, which was already becoming apparent in the 2010’s but seems much more present in the 2020’s. The relentless rise in huge and horrific extreme weather events and the slow but equally relentless reductions in food production because of climate breakdown.

All in all, the 2020’s have so far been a decade of almost permanent economic crisis.

Winners, losers and inequality in times of crisis

Each of these crises has its own unique aspects but also has some strong similarities, especially regarding inequality. These crises are always hardest on ordinary people everywhere; and particularly on women, racialised groups and other vulnerable people. They are also particularly hard on ordinary people in the Global South, in countries that are largely unable to provide them the kind of social protection that is available to many in the Global North.

Each crisis costs governments dearly, and drives up public debt, as they seek to stay afloat and where possible help their populations. Once again, whilst almost all governments feel the fiscal pain, rich country governments, with their hard currencies, have much lower borrowing costs, and Global South governments are the most exposed.

Finally, each crisis, whilst at times temporarily denuding the fortunes of the richest, always seems to leave them richer than they were before.

Compound crises

Picture a family in Nairobi, whose main breadwinner is a taxi driver, who have a small plot of land back in their home village. The lockdowns of Covid-19 hit business hard with tourism grinding to a halt, but they managed to scrape by. Poor and erratic rains have meant food and income from their small piece of land has been much lower than it used to be. At one point in 2021 they had to move house in their informal settlement of Kawangware in Nairobi because of flooding that damaged their building and swept away many of their belongings.

When the food and fuel crisis hit in 2022 they had to take out a loan against their car, so they managed to avoid selling the taxi but ended up in much more debt. In 2023 the hospital bills and funeral costs of the taxi drivers’ mother also added significantly to their financial problems. Their oldest daughter had to drop out of high school as there was not enough money to pay school fees.

Now in 2026, with the very sharp rise in food and fuel prices once again, they may be forced to sell the taxi, to have enough to pay rent and buy food to survive. They are contemplating taking their other children out of school and moving back to the village.

This is a fictional story but based on a family I know very well. It is I think probably very typical of the majority of humanity- around half of the global population live below the $8.30 a day poverty line. Not the poorest of the poor but just scraping by. It shows how personal and global shocks hit families hard, and how they can also interact. How it is possible to get through one crisis, maybe two, but beyond that crises compound and the scars left become more and more permanent and serious. This includes debt traps and the slow depletion of what few assets a family owns, including the need to sell assets like a car that undermine the way the family makes its money.

This is known as the ‘poverty rachet’ effect, made famous by the brilliant Robert Chambers; whereby sudden, irreversible events (like a medical emergency, a bad harvest, or a forced distress sale of land) can permanently lock a household into a lower economic tier.

Governments too, follow a similar path, having to take on further debts, often in foreign currency and at high interest, to get through one crisis, only to be hit by another, and then another, slowing development to a standstill and throwing things into reverse.

Wealth rachets

Whilst not described perhaps in quite the same way, wealth too is I think subject to a rachet effect from multiple crises. We know of course that in normal times, when someone becomes very wealthy, then that wealth can develop a momentum of its own. Wealth begets more wealth and is maintained over generations.

At times of crisis economic wealth is often in part destroyed, but what we see is how fast it bounces back, and how resilient it is. Wealth can become more concentrated still, as even when the richest lose assets in a crisis, they still have resources left to buy up the assets sold by others, often at knockdown prices, or are able to use their wealth to lend to others, often through financial intermediaries. So, each crisis can increase wealth concentration sharply.

The super rich saw their wealth hugely inflated by government interventions in their economies in response to the 2008 Financial Crisis and then again in 2020 when Covid-19 hit; trillions of dollars were poured into the global economy, driving up asset prices worldwide, and with this the fortunes of the richest. They have been able to use these resources to reinvest and in turn to make money out of subsequent crises; for example, in lending more money at high rates of interest to countries of the Global South, or in the rapidly rising shares of food and energy corporations or weapons manufacturers.

This graph in The Economist a couple of weeks ago pretty much sums that up:

Centrifugal or centripetal crises

Joseph Stiglitz talks about centrifugal forces in the economy, which, like a roundabout in children’s playground, force things outwards, driving inequality higher. Economic shocks are I think very likely to have this centrifugal impact on our economies, with each crisis driving us further apart.

He contrasts this with centripetal forces in the economy, which can act to increase equality. An example could be market regulation, or investment in public services.

Yet in the 20^th century, the response to shocks like the Great Depression in the USA, or World War Two, actually led to greater equality, not greater inequality in many countries. There is no automatic link between economic crises and rising inequality, although this is much more common. Governments can respond to economic shocks ways that actually reduce equality.

Most recently this was true with income inequality during Covid-19 in a number of countries; in the USA, whist wealth inequality grew, income inequality fell faster during Covid-19 than it had for decades, and child poverty was cut by 40%, the largest drop ever recorded, thanks to the prompt and generous action by government. Sadly, these government actions were allowed to expire soon afterwards in Congress, losing that progress that was made against child poverty.

At times of crisis, the way people respond often shows their true colours- this is true of governments too.

Equality is also the best protection

Looking at things the other way round, in a world of almost annual economic shocks and seemingly permanent crisis I strongly think that the most direct way to mitigate their harmful impacts is to have a low level of inequality in the first place.

More equal societies for a start radically reduce the individual impact of personal crises. For example, free, universal public healthcare stops anyone being forced into poverty by catastrophic health expenditures. It spreads the risk, and makes individual lives far less precarious, even if their incomes are still not very high.

Equality also helps mitigate the impact of global crises too. More equal societies are more cohesive. Risks are distributed more fairly across society, and as a result the overall risks faced are reduced. They are more prepared to cope with shocks when they arrive, whatever those shocks are; be it the impact of AI, rogue presidents, typhoons, wars, or whatever else.

Equality is the best protection.

ENDS

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 our previous EQUALS episode, Adam Hanieh explores how crises like war, financial shocks, and pandemics ripple across borders through energy prices, food systems, and rising living costs, hitting the poorest of the population the hardest. Listen here.

This week on EQUALS, we explore “Muskism” — the growing power of tech billionaires and what it means for democracy, inequality, and the future of society.

Authors and argue that Elon Musk is not just a billionaire entrepreneur, but a sign of a deeper transformation in capitalism, technology, and political power.

From AI and social media to electric vehicles, digital infrastructure, and government dependence on private tech companies, the episode asks what happens when essential systems are controlled by a handful of corporations and billionaires.

We discuss the rise of “sovereignty as a service,” the growing influence of Big Tech over public life, and whether societies can reduce their dependence on tech monopolies while building more democratic alternatives.

Later in the episode, Hana Ivanhoe joins the conversation to unpack who loses most in this new tech order — and what it would take to reclaim power in an increasingly unequal digital world.

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

Quinn Slobodian is a Canadian historian of global political economy and professor of international history at Boston University. His work tracks how neoliberal ideas shape global power structures, including his book Crack-Up Capitalism.

Ben Tarnoff is a writer focused on technology, labor, and digital power, and a co-founder of Logic Magazine. He is the author of Internet for the People, and writes critically about how the internet is governed and who it serves.

Together, they co-authored Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, examining the political economy behind Elon Musk’s vision of tech power.

What billionaires do with their vast wealth should concern us all. This week’s bulletin looks at new research from Oxfam and the ITUC that shows not just where this wealth is coming from but that it is funding anti-worker projects. Check out last week’s bulletin, if you missed it, on the growing gap between fat cat CEOs and workers.

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Billionaire bounty, in numbers

Economic behemoths. 3,428 billionaires, 86% of them men, dominate the global economy. Collectively, these billionaires have wealth equivalent to 17% of global GDP. Billionaires have significant economic and political influence: seven out of 10 of the largest listed corporates in the world have a billionaire as either a principal shareholder or their CEO.

Reaching new heights. The world’s billionaires reached a new record wealth high in 2026 - they are $4 trillion richer than they were 12 months ago. Four out of five billionaires are richer now than a year ago. Their total wealth is $1.5 trillion more than the combined wealth held by the poorest 4.1 billion people in the world.

Billionaire dividend. Shareholder payouts are perhaps the clearest form of corporate profits being diverted away from what could have been invested or paid out to workers instead. Of the almost 1,000 billionaires whose investment portfolios were identified, nearly $80 billion was paid out to billionaires in dividends in 2025, which equates to $2,500 per second. The average payout was $79.5 million which means that the average billionaire makes more in less than two hours than the average worker will all year.

Billion-dollar payouts. Some of the biggest payouts in 2025 went to Bernard Arnault, owner of luxury brand LVMH who pocketed $3.8 billion and Inditex (Zara) owner Amancio Ortega whose payouts totalled $3.7 billion.

Billionaire profits funding anti-democratic, anti-worker projects. Cash payouts to the richest are not just used to live luxury lifestyles but are also too often used to fuel further attacks on workers, using their wealth to capture politics and the media. Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people.

• Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, has used his wealth to become a major stakeholder in Paramount, which was purchased by his son’s company and includes major broadcast networks CBS.

• In France, far-right fossil-fuel billionaire Vincent Bolloré bought CNews and rebranded it as the French equivalent of Fox news.

• The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post overhauled its opinions section to prioritise content that promotes ‘personal liberties and free markets’.

• Oxfam has filed a UN complaint against billionaire owned Amazon and Walmart for systematic human rights violations. Worker organizations have long drawn attention to the union busting activities of these companies and their aggressive monitoring of workers.

Unions are fighting back. Trade unions are on the frontlines of the fight to protect democracy. The ITUC Fight for Democracy campaign is calling out the corporate underminers of democracy and exposing the billionaire coup against democracy.

Read the full report here

Something to read/listen to

Listen to the latest episode of the Equals podcast with Adam Hanieh who explains why crises like war, financial shocks, and pandemics don’t stay where they start. They move through the structures of the global economy.

Watch highlights from Oxfam in America’s recent event, Beyond America First: US International Economic Policy in a Multipolar World, exploring how US economic policy is evolving in a rapidly shifting global order.
You can also watch the full discussion here.

Read this excerpt from Karl Marx on alienation and labour under capitalism. Written more than 180 years ago, it still cuts uncomfortably close to modern work, inequality, and economic power. Marx on Alienated Labour

Read this new Jacobin article on the forgotten labour struggles in the former Danish colony of Saint Croix, and how enslaved and formerly enslaved workers resisted empire and exploitation.

Clara Mattei’s new book, Escape from Capitalism, explores whether societies can move beyond systems built around austerity, inequality, and profit extraction.

Read this BBC article on the Samsung family completing what is believed to be one of the world’s largest inheritance tax payments — roughly $8 billion over five years.

Listen to this episode of Capitalisn’t on “Muskism” and the changing shape of American capitalism featuring Quinn Slobodian. Also, coming next Tuesday on the EQUALS podcast a new episode with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, authors of Muskism.

Read this new Human Rights Watch feature on how algorithmic management in the gig economy is reshaping work across the world.

As the conflicts in recent weeks have shown, fossil fuel dependence also triggers energy access disruptions and price shocks that disproportionately affect poor households and marginalised communities across the world, who are struggling to afford their bills. Meanwhile, super-rich individuals and corporations reap huge profits from fossil dependence, consolidating power and wealth. These are the true colours of climate inequality.

But an alternative exists. A just transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy is possible, viable and can reshape how societies are organised around energy. It could break the cycle of dependency, inequality and violence.

A truly just transition must go beyond replacing fossil fuels. It must reshape who owns, controls, and benefits from energy, ensuring it is treated as a public good and a human right, rather than a source of profit, power and securitisation.

Humanitarian crisis and Iran: when energy becomes a weapon

The unlawful war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran has killed at least 3,636 people in Iran, including 254 children. Up to 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced from their homes, and strikes have damaged 763 schools and 334 health centres.

A deeply concerning trend is the growing instrumentalization of energy and fossil fuel dependency. Energy infrastructure has been targeted throughout the conflict. More than 80 energy facilities have been attacked since the war began, with damage estimated at up to $58 billion. After Israel bombed facilities in Iran, Tehran responded with strikes on the infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. Inside Iran, communities already under strain have been left enduring daily blackouts.

The war is also burning carbon at a devastating rate. In just 14 days, the conflict generated over 5 million tonnes of CO₂, draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined. And yet, the war is dismantling energy security across the region and could divert around $25 billion into rebuilding fossil fuel infrastructure, repairing the very systems that drive instability, instead of investing in an energy transition.

The closure by Iran of the Strait of Hormuz— which carries around 20% of the world’s crude oil — and the US stopping ships from entering or exiting Iranian ports triggered what the International Energy Agency (IEA) has called the greatest disruption to global oil supply in history.

Because of its reliance on Gulf oil, Asia has been hit hardest: the Philippines declared a national energy emergency, Pakistan announced school closures and homework for half of all public officials to save fuel. In Sri Lanka, fuel prices have risen 33 percent, with food costs possibly climbing up to 15 percent, as fertiliser supply chains also collapse in Hormuz.

The IEA reported more than 32 governments implementing extraordinary energy conservation measures and nearly 50 introducing emergency consumer support. Public budgets are once again being stretched to carry the weight of fossil fuel dependency, subsidising the profits of the corporations driving this crisis.

Venezuela and Cuba: fossil fuel reconfiguration without human recovery

When the US military seized Venezuelan President Maduro at the start of 2026, Trump made one motive clear: U.S. companies would develop Venezuela’s oil reserves and salvage oil revenue. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, according to OPEC: 300 billion barrels or 17 percent of the global total.

Shares of some fossil fuel giants rose between 3-6 percent immediately after the military operation. In April 2026, fossil fuel companies moved to expand their presence in Venezuela, signing deals that included asset swaps and new rights to develop oil fields.

Meanwhile, ordinary Venezuelans still struggle every day to make ends meet. In late March, eight-hour power cuts returned, underscoring that access to reliable electricity and basic services remains fragile. Rising oil production cannot offset years of grid underinvestment, while the intensifying dry seasons and climate shocks continue to strain hydropower, which supplies 77% of electricity.

Nearly 8 million people still require assistance in the country, yet humanitarian response capacity has sharply declined. This gap reveals a critical risk: economic reconfiguration without human recovery.

Cuba tells a parallel story. In January 2026, the U.S. administration moved to severely limit oil shipments to the island. Venezuela had been Cuba’s primary oil supplier for decades, a lifeline now cut off. Cuba’s national electric grid reliant on fossil fuel, collapsed in mid-March.

Blackouts forced hospitals to suspend operations and schools and businesses to close. Shortages of cooking gas, gasoline, and diesel strained transport, food supplies, and water pumps. Once again, it is the poorest who pay the highest price.

Fossil Industry: crisis profiteering

Six of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies — Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies — are projected to earn $3,000 a second in profits in 2026, according to Oxfam research. That is an increase of $37 million a day compared to their 2025 profits. Their projected profits for 2026 stand at $94 billion: enough to provide solar power for the energy needs of almost 50 million people in Africa.

A large share of those profits flows directly to the wealthiest 1 percent — concentrated in the Global North — who profit from the climate destruction these corporations cause, while working to maintain fossil dependence through their monopoly on wealth and political influence.

Yet rather than investing those profits in the transition, these corporations are doubling down on fossil fuels. ExxonMobil announced a reduction of a third of its planned investment in low-carbon energy projects, while TotalEnergies refused to adopt a net-zero transition plan aligned with the 1.5° degrees Celsius target.

The fragility of fossil fuel dependency

Fossil fuel dependence makes energy markets fragile. When wars disrupt supply routes or damage infrastructure, prices surge, supply tightens, and the burden falls on ordinary people through higher energy bills, rising food prices, inflation, and deepening poverty. In 2022, as a ripple effect of the war in Ukraine, energy and food price shocks pushed over 70 million people into poverty in just three months.

For oil-producing countries, dependence on revenues from fossil fuels exposes economies to volatility and external interference. For consuming countries, reliance on imported fossil fuels creates exposure to price shocks and geopolitics.

African countries such as South Sudan and Zimbabwe illustrate this vulnerability. South Sudan, home to East Africa’s largest oil reserves, still imports most of its fuel due to a lack of refining capacity, and generates 96 percent of its electricity from oil. During the Hormuz crisis, power cuts in the capital Juba lasted up to 12 hours a day, paralysing businesses and daily life.

Zimbabwe, reliant on fossil fuel imports, began diluting petrol with ethanol and announced plans to scrap fuel taxes to ease prices. However, this measure has its own distributional challenges: ethanol blending does not necessarily reduce transport costs for consumers. While locally produced ethanol is untaxed, potentially easing prices, it can also reduce government revenue and concentrate benefits among a few large, wealthy producers.

The resilience of renewable energy

Renewable energy offers a more secure, resilient, and equitable alternative. Decentralized systems such as solar and wind are less vulnerable to targeted attacks, quicker to repair, and support grid stability during emergencies, as seen in Ukraine. They do not rely on continuous extraction, processing, and long-distance transport through fragile supply chains. Once deployed, renewables are locally available resources, reducing exposure to geopolitical shocks.

Renewables offer more stable costs, shielding households from the extreme price volatility, especially during conflicts. During the Hormuz crisis, electricity prices rose across Europe, but significantly less in Spain due to lower gas dependence. The country generates about 57 percent of its energy from renewables. Solar, wind, and hydro complement each other across seasons and times of day, reducing the need for gas as the backup source.

Renewables can shift power away from concentrated ownership by enabling decentralised, locally distributed generation that strengthens community resilience. Lebanon has shown the strong potential of decentralised renewable energy, as the recent economic crisis drove thousands of households and businesses to adopt solar power to provide essential services, such as water pumping. However, this transition was mired with inequalities in access, with poor households and marginalized communities unable to reap the same benefits. Lebanon’s energy potential was also harmed by Israel’s relentless military campaign which has also targeted solar panels, as it was done in Gaza, showing the limitations of resilience against such systematic destruction.

The Path Forward: Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels

The energy transition is not only about reducing emissions. It is about addressing one of the structural drivers of inequality, humanitarian crisis, and violence: fossil fuel dependence.

A just transition also depends on reforming the international financial architecture, which currently strangles the fiscal space in the Global South and tightens further during war and crisis. This drives debt burdens that can lock developing countries into fossil fuel dependency and constrain climate action. Global North countries must not only move first and faster but also enable the Global South to do the same.

A just and accelerated transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy offers a shared path forward. It can reduce emissions, ease geopolitical tensions tied to resource extraction and control, and strengthen energy access and security for communities. Most importantly, it can help build a fairer system in which the benefits of energy are more equitably shared, rather than concentrated among a few.

Author: Mateo Adarve Zuluaga is the Global Research and Advocacy Lead at Oxfam Great Britain.

For more on the political economy of war, oil, and inequality, listen to our recent EQUALS podcast conversation with Adam Hanieh.

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Beyond this immediate devastation, the conflict is also driving wider consequences including higher energy bills, rising costs of food, deepening poverty, environmental destruction, and widening inequality whilst ordinary people everywhere will face ethe costs. It is communities in the Global South who live in poor and climate-vulnerable countries and have the least means to adapt to the growing chaos, face the brunt of the impacts – with women and girls disproportionately impacted.

Meanwhile, fossil fuels corporations are set to secure some of their best profits in history. As Oxfam research shows , fossil fuel companies are projected to earn almost $3,000 a second in 2026 while families struggle to afford energy bills worldwide.

A glimpse of hope?

The first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, held in Santa Marta last week, must be celebrated and it is a welcome solutions-driven process for moving away from fossil fuel dependency. Yet a key question remains over the political will to shift to translate words into action. Implementing a fossil-free future presents many political and financial hurdles, especially for the Global South that face increasing debt levels and limited support from richer countries.

Without proper finance to fund a fair transition away from fossil fuels, low- and middle-income countries won’t be able to phase out fossil fuels as fast, or at all. Many of them are trapped into drilling oil to service their debts, not to foster development. Over 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on paying debt interest charges than on health or education.

This is by design. The global energy system continues to follow a colonial model, where Global North countries extract resources and labour from the Global South – in this case, oil and gas – while the richest people and governments hoard the profits. Even if developing countries want to transition away from fossil fuels, they are faced with policy conditionalities of international financial institutions that reinforce the exploitation of fossil fuels. One study found that the IMF loan agreements with 11 of the worlds poorest countries were assuming that they must continue drilling in order to repay their debts.

The current financial architecture seems to penalize rather than help climate champions. In 2023, after a historic national referendum in Ecuador, that decided against the exploration of new oil reserves the country’s credit rating was downgraded by the international financial system, increasing the costs of its borrowing.

A just transition away from fossil fuels must not replicate the colonial power dynamics of the current energy system. It must happen hand-in-hand with a reform of the international financial architecture: addressing the debt crisis, rejecting the private investor-led approach to development and climate finance, reversing the aid cuts, and making sure the finance for a just transition comes from those most responsible for the climate crisis, not the poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries.

Global South leading the way for the just transition

Despite all the challenges, low- and middle-income countries are leading the way. Colombian president Gustavo Petro, was elected in 2022, aiming to decrease fossil fuel extraction, despite this accounting for around half of the country’s exports, two thirds of final energy consumption and 3 to 6 percent of GDP.

Colombia is not alone. These efforts should be celebrated and concretely supported, not penalised. Rich, historic polluters must phase out first and faster. Rhetoric by Global North promising to address these system’s imbalances such as addressing inequality or supporting fairer debt and tax decision making forums is not translating into practice.

To end the fossil fuel dependency and fund a just transition, we need a reformed international financial system where the Global South can have a voice and meaningful participation in economic decision making: if they’re not at the table, then they will continue to be on the menu. Until then, the only people benefiting from this system are rich polluters, the super-rich and vested interests.

The momentum gathered in Santa Marta must send a clear sign to policymakers around the world to carry on the momentum for a fossil free future in other international processes such as the upcoming UN climate talks in Bonn in June, COP31 in Turkey, and the second transition conference hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland in 2027. This year, global leaders must drop the fossil fuel dependency and pave a new, fairer path.

Author: Mariana Paoli is the Climate Justice Policy & Advocacy Lead at Oxfam International.

As governments convened in Santa Marta as part of a collation of the willing to phase out fossil fuels, last week’s Bulletin looked at how oil and gas companies are profiting from the current crisis.

Listen to the latest episode of the Equals podcast with Adam Hanieh who explains why crises like war, financial shocks, and pandemics don’t stay where they start. They move through the structures of the global economy.

New analysis by the ITUC and Oxfam reveals extensive erosion of average global wages since the pandemic, while the chief executives of the top paying companies have received massive pay hikes. Billionaires are richer than ever before, and the research provides new insight into the huge dividends they are being paid.

This week’s bulletin looks at the growing divide between workers and fat cat CEOs. Next week will focus on the billionaire bonanza.

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Working for the rich… in numbers

The context. Even before the most recent energy crisis caused by the unlawful attacks by Israel and the US, and Iran’s response, people were reeling from a series of price shocks that they have never recovered from. Between 2019 to 2025, food prices increased by 15% and gasoline prices by 14% in real terms. In 43% of countries, governments have not increased minimum wages in line with inflation during this period.

Progress against in-work poverty has decelerated sharply. Between 2000 to 2019, working poverty was falling at 7% per year on average - since 2020 the rate of decrease has more than halved to 3%. Having a job is no guarantee of escaping poverty.

A boom year for CEOs. In 2025, the world’s top 1,500 best paid CEOs got an 11% real term pay rise compared to the year before. Compared to workers, whose pay increased by just 0.5%, their remuneration increased 20 times more than the global worker average. It would take 490 years for the average worker to make what the average CEO made in 2025 alone.

The fattest cats of them all. The 10 highest paid CEOs were collectively paid over $1 billion in 2025, four of them paid over $100 million. Top paid executives include the CEO of semiconductor corporation Broadcom who was paid $205 million, the CEOs of investors and bankers Blackstone and Goldman Sachs who were paid $126 million and $119 million respectively, and Microsoft CEO paid $96 million.

Pay cut for workers. Global average pay has fallen by 12% since 2019 while CEOs have had a 54% pay rise over the same period. In 2025, workers effectively worked 31 days for free. Since 2019, workers have effectively worked a total of 108 days for free.

Persistent gender pay gap. Within the top paying 1,500 companies just 6% of the CEOs are women. The average gender pay gap of employees in these 1,500 companies is 16% - this means that women will effectively stop being paid on 4 November this year.

Decline in labour share. The labour share of GDP is a measure of how much economic value goes to workers compared to the people who own capital, for example shareholders and landlords. Since 2019, the labour share has declined by 0.4 percentage points, costing workers $469 billion in 2025 and exacerbating the gap between capital and labour.

Despite increasing productivity. The economic output per worker has increased by 51% compared to 2004 but workers are receiving 2% less share of income. Reasons for this include wage suppression and the decline and repression of trade union membership, the acceleration in technology and automation, the financialization of the economy, and market concentration of large corporations. The consequences have been higher profits for shareholders with a lower share going to wages.

Read the full report here

Make sure to subscribe for part two next week on how the billionaire bonanza is funding anti-democratic, anti-worker projects.

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Something to read/listen to

Listen to the latest episode of the Equals podcast with Adam Hanieh who explains why crises like war, financial shocks, and pandemics don’t stay where they start. They move through the structures of the global economy.

A new database focusing especially on the transfer of wealth through inheritance. It also includes information on how inheritance is taxed in different countries and time periods.

Read this new article quantifying climate loss and damage.

He explains how the effect of the Middle East war is going to move beyond borders through energy prices, food prices and security and consequently high cost of living, hitting the poorest of the population the hardest. Drawing on the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, Adam shows how these shocks consistently deepen inequality, hitting the most vulnerable hardest.

He unpacks the central role of the Gulf countries in global supply chains, from oil and gas to fertilisers and industrial materials, and how disruptions in the region can drive inflation, strain food systems, and raise the cost of living worldwide.

The conversation also explores the risks of continued dependence on fossil fuels, and why responding to these interconnected crises requires international cooperation rather than fragmented, national responses.

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

Sir Humphrey, the quintessential obfuscating bureaucrat. If you click on the picture it should take you to the clip.

It is timeless classic because it captures a feeling about the way bureaucracy and politicians interact. Bureaucrats run rings around the politicians to ensure nothing is ever done, and the politicians are weak, self-interested and easily hoodwinked by the bureaucrats. You are left laughing about just how inept government and politicians are.

In more recent years, there have been a rash of new political dramas, for example ‘The Thick of It’ about UK politics or ‘Veep’ about US politics. ‘House of Cards’, was originally made by the BBC about UK politics was successfully transposed to the US. In Brazil, the show ‘O Mecanismo’ or ‘The Whirlwind’ in Korea were both very negative, portraying politicians and politics as broadly corrupt and self-serving.

What all these programmes have in common is an even deeper cynicism about politicians and government. They tend to focus on the self-interested motivations of the characters, and through this, focus on traits of ‘artifice, pandering, deceit and positioning for advantage- in general mistrustfulness’. If values and morals are mentioned, it is usually to be derided and mocked, mainly as weaknesses.

The West Wing- I have always striven and entirely failed to be as cool and unflappable as Leo (right) the Presidents Chief of Staff

Not all political dramas are entirely cynical; ‘Borgen’ in Denmark started off pretty idealistic- although it did get increasingly cynical as the series progressed. Another wildly successful series was ‘The West Wing’, which was about a pragmatic but progressive and value driven US President and his team trying to do his best to make the world a better place. It was felt by many at the time to be Hollywood’s answer to the real-world disappointments of the Clinton and Bush Presidencies.

One scientific study actually measured participants level of cynicism before and after watching episodes of ‘The West Wing’ or ‘House of Cards’ and found that House of Cards did increase people’s negativity about politics considerably.

Who benefits most from people becoming cynical about politics and politicians?

I think arguably broad cynicism with all politicians and government benefits those on the right of the political spectrum more than the left. Such cynicism drives down participation in democracy and a belief that voting can ever make a difference. Usually, the first to stop voting and exercising their democratic rights are the poorest people too.

As perhaps further evidence of this, ‘Yes Minister’ was one of Mrs Thatcher’s and Friedrich von Hayek’s favourite programmes. It was co-written by Anthony Jay, who was a close collaborator with right wing free market think tanks, and a speechwriter for Conservative politicians.

Well organised democratic politics is I think the most powerful yet peaceful mechanism ever invented to put the brakes on runaway capitalism and extreme inequality. It follows that anything that drives up political apathy and drives down political participation ultimately harms politicians on the left more than the right, as even if politicians on the right lose trust, the outcome is more power given to market forces.

Is art just imitating life?

But are these dramas just reflecting reality? Are they just showing us, in very funny ways, the reality of politicians, as entirely self-serving? I think many reading this will be thinking that these comedies are holding up a dark mirror to a dark reality; that politicians are indeed all the same, and united in their dishonesty, ambition and self-interest.

My own feeling is that this is neither fair nor accurate.

This is not to deny that in many countries, all leading politicians are terrible. That is clearly the case, and depressingly often. But just because it is often the case empirically, doesn’t mean that it is somehow an a priori fact. To put it another way, the fact that all of today’s politicians are useless and cynical does not mean we can conclude that all politicians are useless and cynical at all times and in all places.

(Arguably too this could in some ways become a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the more that politics is presented as an entirely cynical endeavour, the more it is likely to attract those the kinds of characters who operate primarily in this way, and the more it is likely to put better, more value driven individuals off pursuing politics- what has been described elsewhere as a spiral of cynicism).

Equally, just because politicians exhibit self-interested or other behaviours, does not mean that this is their only, or even their main motivation. We know from life, that unlike Hollywood, people are complicated; people do things for multiple reasons, often combining both values and self-interest.

Even the most moral politicians need to be good at politics

I would also say that political skills are essential for a good politician, which might seem obvious, but is an important point. The best politicians need to find ways to out manoeuvre their opponents and out communicate them too. Skills of building constituencies of support, of deal making, compromise, strategy- all of these are important if politicians are going to secure real change. The key thing I think is not that these skills are bad necessarily, but that they don’t become an end in themselves, but are instead deployed with the aim of securing real, progressive change. It is also pretty useless arguably to have unimpeachable moral values and commitments but never have the political skills to really achieve anything. Politics free values are as ineffective as value free politics in many ways.

Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania, with President John F Kennedy

If you think of the most successful, progressive politicians in history, whether independence leaders like Nehru in India or Nyerere in Tanzania, or progressive leaders like FDR in the US or Clement Attlee in the UK, all of them combined strong political skills with a strong commitment to building a better world for ordinary people. They were not saints, but neither were their actions reducible to naked self-interest either. On the other side, I think right wing politicians like Mrs Thatcher cannot be simply reduced to cynical self-interest; they were also driven by values too.

Defending Democracy

The recent summit hosted by Spain in Barcelona of world leaders coming together to defend democracy was to my mind a good example of politicians collectively pushing for a better world. The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, has been particularly vocal in his opposition to war, and championing of the fight against inequality. He is clearly driven by values, but at the same time is an extremely successful politician who has managed to side-step many seemingly existential threats to his career and his government and consistently deliver progressive policies in Spain.

It is interesting and clever I think that these left-leaning leaders have chosen to brand their summit as a ‘Defence of Democracy’. Democracy is normally perceived as a good in itself, something above ideologies of left and right. This I think is true. It is also true that not just the right, but the left too can be anti-democratic and authoritarian.

But equally, ultimately, I think the demise and denigration of democracy harms the powerless far more than the powerful. This is because politics offers a way to balance human interests that is an alternative to a balance based instead on wealth or power.

So, I think we need to fight the cynical rejection of politics. We must always maintain that politicians are not all the same. That it is vital that we support politicians who are good at politics whilst strongly focused on building a better world.

You’d think that the argument for phasing out fossil fuels couldn’t be stronger right now. Beyond the devastation global warming is bringing the planet, there is a clear case for renewables providing energy security. But instead, the dominant narrative, pushed by fossil fuel interests, seems to be to drill for more oil and gas.

As governments convene in Santa Marta as part of a collation of the willing to phase out fossil fuels, this week’s Bulletin looks at how oil and gas companies are profiting from the current crisis.

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Big oil profits, in numbers

Six oil giants are on track to earn nearly $3,000 every second in 2026. Using consensus estimates, which is the average of the forecasts that financial analysis make, the Big 6 oil companies are on track to make a combined $94 billion, which is enough to provide solar power for the energy needs of almost 50 million people in Africa.

Dividends of war. The fossil fuel business was already making rich shareholders a nice return and the disruption caused by war is estimated to add $13 billion to their profits – a 17% increase compared to 2025.

While families suffer. Food and energy price increases hit the worst off the hardest. People in the poorest countries spend 2.4 times more on food as a proportion of their income than people in high-income countries. The UN estimate that the war could push 30 million people into poverty.

Public support for change. While right-wing politicians and media push to drill for more oil, the public support progressive policies. In an Oxfam commissioned survey across seven countries, three times as many citizens support greater government investment in renewable energy compared to increasing fossil fuel extraction, and two thirds supported increasing taxes on the profits of large oil and gas corporations to help fund the transition to renewables.

Fossil fuel companies walking away from renewables. Just last month, ExxonMobil announced a significant reduction of a third of its planned investment in low-carbon energy projects and TotalEnergies refused to adopt a net zero transition plan aligned with 1.5 degrees.

Hope from Santa Marta? The conference comes against the backdrop what the executive director of the International Energy Agency, has called “the mother of all energy crises.” Shortages of oil and gas mean that governments aren’t only wanting to transition for climate reasons. Renewables are cheaper and more secure from geopolitical shocks than fossil fuels.

Wealthy governments still have not stepped up to provide sufficient climate financing for poorer countries to make the phase out, but Santa Marta is just the first step of the process to a just transition.

Something to read/listen to

Read this new study about how people dramatically underestimate the scale of wage inequality. Nearly everyone prefers lower wage inequality, including across political lines. Far-right voters are those most affected when presented with facts around inequality.

Here is a mind-blowing graph from the study showing the gap between what people believe and the actual ratio of CEO to worker wages.

Read about the California billionaire tax proposal that will go to the ballot.

The Equals Bulletin has been on a short break but the latest season of the Equals Podcast has been in full swing. Catch up with the latest episodes:

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Dr. Wanga Zembe-Mkabile, social policy expert and one of the Founding Committee members of the International Panel on Inequality (IPI), brings a critical perspective often missing from economic debates: the human and embodied experience of inequality. Drawing on research in social determinants of health and epidemiology, she explains how the conditions people are born into shape not only income and opportunity, but health outcomes, life expectancy, and overall well-being.

This conversation also challenges dominant ideas of meritocracy, showing how structural inequality predetermines life chances long before individuals can “compete.” It also explores why inequality is no longer just a development issue, but a global emergency with consequences for economic stability, personal well-being, security and trust in institutions.

As momentum builds behind the International Panel on Inequality, this episode examines what a global, multidisciplinary body could mean for policymakers, governments, and the development sector. Can better evidence, and better framing, drive more effective action on economic justice?

For economists, policymakers, and anyone working on inequality, this episode offers a deeper understanding of how inequality operates across systems—and why addressing it requires more than data alone.

This is the second episode in a short series on the International Panel on Inequality. In our previous episode, we were joined by and Katy Chakrabortty on the process of making the IPI and what aims to achieve.

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

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In this episode, we explore a bold new proposal from a panel of leading experts from around the world, chaired by Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz: International Panel on inequality (IPI), something similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but focused on economic inequality. The idea is to bring together the best global evidence, track progress, and give policymakers a clearer, shared foundation to act on one of the defining challenges of our time.
But building a global response to inequality is not a small task. It means navigating politics, coordinating across countries, and turning knowledge into action in a world that doesn’t always agree on the solutions. What could a panel like this realistically achieve? And what might it change about how we understand and tackle inequality?
At a time when faith in global cooperation is shaky and multilateralism is under strain, this could be a serious step forward and a test of whether the world is ready to act on inequality at the scale the crisis demands.
This is the first episode in a short series on the International Panel on Inequality. In the next episode, we’ll be joined by Dr. Wanga Zembe-Mkabile, a member of the founding committee of the IPI, to take the conversation further.

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