Private jets typify the callous indifference of the super-rich who profit from destroying the planet, then jet off to air-conditioned mansions to hide from the consequences.

Our friends at Inequality.org and the Institute for Policy Studies have given us access to a new tool that tracks private jets. As this week’s Bulletin reveals, climate disasters haven’t held rich polluters back.

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Private jets in numbers

Plane awful. So far in 2026, there have been almost 2 million private jet flights, 8,906 on average per day. Emissions from these jets total 9.4 million tonnes of CO2, that’s more than the average annual emissions of 2 million people.

Or, if you prefer your stat in cow form…it’s equivalent to the belching and farting of 5.4 million cows.

Short haul. 22% of the flights travelled less than 300 km, 1 in 14 flights were less than 30 minutes. Have these people not heard of a train or a bus?

There’s been almost 3,000 London/Paris flights so far this year (13 per day), a journey that takes just over 2 hours on the Eurostar. 858 flights have done the Madrid/Barcelona trip which is just 2 ½ hours by rail.

Taking off. 2026 follows the ever-growing trend of private jets. Compared to 2025, there have been 6% more flights and emissions have increased by 7%. On a totally different note, the world is set to cross 1.5°C global warming within a few years.

A carry-on summer. You’d think that the wildfires in Europe, especially around Madrid and Bordeaux, would be a visceral deterrent for billionaire climate vandals. Yeah right!

Private jet departures around Madrid during the fires (July and August) increased by 12% compared to last year.

President Emmanuel Macron described France’s wildfires as the toughest situation the country has faced since World War II. That didn’t stop private jets during their summer. While the total departures from Bordeaux were down by a quarter compared to 2025, overall private jet flights increased in France by 4%.

Coolcation. England and Wales faced back-to-back heatwaves, so tourists have been heading to Scotland for a ‘coolcation’ – private jets arriving in Scotland from England were up by 16% in June and July compared to the same period last year. Global flights into Iceland were up by 19%.

Fear not, there’s a better solution, the rich are now building snow rooms for their mansions.

Having a ball. During the World Cup, the team at Private Jet Accountability Project tracked the increase in private jets around games. They found that over 90,000 private jets flew in and out of World Cup host cities.

In a flap. It’s fair to say billionaires don’t like it when they’re held to account. In the US, private jet owners can now anonymise their registration information, a longstanding demand of the wealthy elite. Bernard Arnault, CEO of the LVMH luxury goods company, sold his private jet to avoid being tracked. He said, ‘the result now is that no one can see where I go because I rent planes when I use private planes’.

They also probably don’t appreciate the successful campaigning efforts by colleagues at Oxfam Scotland, where the government has now committed to introduce a Private Jet Tax from April 2028. In 2024, the UK government increased air passenger duty by 50% for private jet users following pressure from civil society, including Oxfam.

Many thanks to the team at the Institute for Policy Studies and Private Jet Accountability Project for access to their fantastic database so that we could do this analysis.

Something to read/listen to

Read this article in the Lancet that finds that implementing wealth redistribution policies could mitigate the health impact of the current Official Development Assistance (ODA) defunding crisis.

Meet the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners who amassed evidence that upper-class people are more likely to steal candy from a child…and other kinds of unethical behaviour.

Read this article in DW on how climate change and food insecurity could fuel more conflicts.

Note on methodology

The code for the private jet tracker is available on Github. We used the private jet emissions trackers’ EUROCONTROL Fast Model using CO2e tank-to-wake only which is direct fuel combustion, for the date range 1 January 00:00 UTC to 13 August 00:59 UTC (unless states). The distances were calculated by using the great circle between the take-off and landing airport coordinates rather than the route actually flown. Global average CO2 emissions are 4.73 tonnes CO2. We assume 1.75 tonnes CO2e/cow/year.

The report paints a bleak picture and yet does not cover the severe disruption in global food production and affordability because of the war in the Middle East, and now again in Ukraine, as it is up to 2025- factors together with climate breakdown and El Nino, that are very likely to worsen global hunger.

Recent reductions in hunger but the world is still worse off than a decade ago

The number of people facing moderate or severe food insecurity fell by 86 million between 2024 and 2025 to 2.1 billion people. Despite this welcome reduction, this still means one in four people worldwide is food insecure today, compared to 1 in five in 2015, an increase of more than half a billion people from a decade ago.

While the gap between the share of men and women facing food insecurity narrowed between 2024 and 2025, the proportion of women facing food insecurity is still slightly higher than that of men.

Food insecurity is highest in poorer countries; for instance, it affects 56% of Africans. But ordinary people in rich countries are also increasingly facing food insecurity. In North America and Europe, nearly 100 million people, or 1 in ten, are food insecure.

Healthy food is unaffordable for a third of the global population

Having food to eat is one thing, and affording a healthy meal is another. A lack of healthy meals costs lives, leads to preventable diseases, and costs economies. For children, it has lifelong impacts on well-being, health, educational outcomes, and lifetime earnings. Globally, 2.7 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

Food is more expensive in poor countries than in rich ones

The cost of a healthy diet has risen sharply over the past few years and is 37% up compared to 2019. Higher food prices disproportionately affect ordinary people and low-income earners because food makes up the largest share of their incomes.

Food costs more in poorer countries than in rich ones. In Africa, a healthy diet costs a fifth more than in Europe and North America. This means that people in poor countries not only have lower incomes, but they face higher food costs than those in rich countries.

The world is producing enough food, so why are billions hungry?

Hunger is a problem of inequality, not of overall levels of available food. Farmers are producing enough food for everyone in the world. However, rising food prices, the financialisation of global food markets, low and stagnating incomes, unfair global trade rules, and weak social protection systems mean hundreds of millions of people cannot afford it, even when it’s available. Wars, export bans, and a lack of basic infrastructure to move food from farmers to consumers hinder access. As much as 20% of the food produced goes to waste.

Climate change is making food production more expensive and impacting farmers’ livelihoods. Dismal public investment in food security in poorer countries adds another layer that perpetuates food crises, leaving them at the mercy of the global food system.

The people making money out of global hunger

An exploitative global food market and profiteering deliver bumper profits to global multinationals and their wealthy owners.

In 2022, when the world faced high food prices and disruptions to food supply and production that pushed millions into hunger, the food and energy billionaires made a $453 billion windfall, and 62 new food billionaires were created.

Multinationals and the wealthiest people have greater influence over policies and politics than ordinary people, so they can shape global food rules and food production in ways that benefit them.

Looming Food crisis from war, climate and now a super El Niño

A series of shocks are combining to drive up hunger in the next year. The looming El Niño is expected to worsen hunger. Unlike recent El Niños, this one is likely to be the severest in over a century an comes on top the rapidly growing impact of climate breakdown on food production. Excessive precipitation in some regions and severe droughts in others will severely disrupt food production and livelihoods. Yet governments and the international community are doing little, if anything, to avert this looming food crisis.

How to make the world food secure

No one on earth should be hungry. It is the ultimate inequality. Enhancing food production matters, as does ensuring food is accessible and affordable for everyone. So what can we do?

First, we must drastically reduce current high economic inequality and the influence of the richest and other mega corporations on the global food market. A fairer, more equal world is a food-secure one.

Secondly, we must prioritise universal social protection so people have income to buy food. This will also ensure that a failed harvest doesn’t push small-scale farmers into poverty. Low-income earners, women and children will benefit disproportionately. A universal social protection system could even increase food production because farmers can invest in improving their yields.

Thirdly is regulating the global food market, including its financialisation, speculation, and profiteering. Doing so will make food more affordable and accessible and ensure that mega global corporates and traders do not rip off farmers and consumers. On top of this, fair global trade rules will support food security for many countries of the Global South.

Fourthly is increased public investment in agriculture, especially in low- and lower-middle-income countries, many of which are net food importers. But many of these countries face a high debt burden, which transfers money to wealthy lenders while worsening food security as governments are left with nothing. Global support and cooperation in tackling debt burdens is therefore critical.

Lastly, rich countries must fulfil their climate finance commitments, which will help tackle food insecurity in developing countries, which are most vulnerable to climate and food shocks.

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In this week’s Bulletin we review inequality numbers for 2026 so far.

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2026 inequality… in numbers

Pollutocrat day. Unless you’ve been hiding under an air-conditioned rock, you’ll have noticed the planet is on fire. The world’s richest people can take a bow for their disproportionate contribution to that. Just 10 days into 2026 and the richest 1% had burned up their annual carbon budget. The top 0.1% used theirs up in 3 days.

Davos week. As sure as a setting sun will rise again or that the rich will dodge tax, January brings Oxfam’s blistering analysis of global inequality. Timed as world leaders and oligarchs meet at the Swiss ski resort to celebrate their winnings (which Oxfam kindly counts for them), it always captures l’essence of a divided world.

2025, was a record-breaking year for billionaires. Since Donald Trump came to office, billionaire wealth increased three times faster than the past five-year average. Trump’s agenda of championing deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation has benefited the richest everywhere.

Resisting the rule of the rich. The events of 2025 made one thing painfully clear: the world’s super-rich have not only accumulated more wealth than could ever be spent – they have used this wealth to secure the political power to shape the rules that define our economies and govern countries and the world.

Oxfam estimates that billionaires are at least 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people.

Thank God the UK has a bin to take on the billionaires buying their way into politics.

Defaulting on development. After all those tax cuts for the rich, there was clearly nothing left for investments into health, education, and fighting climate change. The Global South faces a mounting debt crisis while aid spending is been slashed.

5.2 billion people live in countries where debt payments are higher than total social spending. The World Bank rates over half of low-income countries as “at high risk of debt distress” or “in debt distress”. Debt holders are doing nicely, rich bondholders of six countries that recently restructured their debt made an average profit of 38%.

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. Projected aid cuts will kill about 9 million people by 2030.

A celebration for CEOs or the working class? International Workers’ Day is a time to celebrate victories for worker organisations. This year, however, Oxfam and the ITUC revealed that CEO pay soared 20 times faster than workers’ pay in 2025.

But hey, when we win the fight to tax the rich, those fat cats will be nice and plump.

Who wants to be a trillionaire? The moment we’d been waiting for. The Oxfam statistical rage-bait team were refreshing the Forbes billionaire list like they were tickets for Glastonbury. Rocket man, Elon Musk, saw this wealth officially reach the stratosphere (if only he’d go there and not come back), becoming the world’s first (temporary) trillionaire.

For a while there, Musk was wealthier than the combined wealth of 3.8 billion people.

Spoils of war. Big Oil have been making Big Bucks, an exclusive Equals investigation found. The second quarter combined profits of the Big 6 increased to $50.6 billion - a 220% increase on Q1.

But how to spend all that war money? Perhaps ramping up investments in renewables (after all, the world is on fire)? Of course not, time to Drill Baby, Drill! By 2030, the six corporations plan to increase oil and gas production by 14% compared to 2024 levels. Big Oil’s emissions were sufficient to cause around 1 in 4 heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023 – heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.

Of course, we’re the ones feeling the heat, not rich polluters.

Scope for hope? While members of the Equals team specialise as prophets of doom, we are becoming increasingly up-beat about the momentum behind taxing the rich. Wealth tax economists are becoming household names, and people are marching in the street calling for taxes named after them! Just in the last few years, wealth taxes on the super-rich have been introduced or strengthened in Norway, Spain, Tunisia, Argentina and Bolivia. And new proposals are popping up everywhere.

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

Exclusive new analysis of Big Oil reveals that:

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

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

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

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

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

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Equals Investigates...Big Oil profits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full methodology note for the research is here.

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

^[i] Eni has significant state ownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Progress towards a wealth tax on the super-rich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is giving you hope? Comment below.

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Something to read/listen to

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

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

Watch Jayati Ghosh on why we must move beyond growth.

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

Watch Patriotic Millionaire’s new wealth tax campaign video.

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

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.

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Abolishing billionaires

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

Campaigning for convergence

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

Class matters more than country

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

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

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

Not degrowth but very different growth

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

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

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

(Almost) everyone will benefit

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

A Global Justice Fund

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

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

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

An equally divided pie in the sky?

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

Read the report

Something to read/listen to

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

We also know that wherever there is huge market volatility and turmoil, there’s also an opportunity for shareholders to profit.

Following Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, the very richest became dramatically richer and corporate profits hit record highs. Between 2020-2022, food and energy billionaires pocketed $453 billion, with 62 new food billionaires minted. Five of the largest energy companies – BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, Exxon and Chevron – were making a combined profit of $2,600 every second, as energy prices rocketed following Russia’s invasion.

This is highly likely to repeat itself, and we’ll be analysing the impact of the war on inequality in future Bulletins. As the data in this week’s Bulletin, analysing the Forbes 40^th annual billionaires list, shows, the super-rich are starting from an even higher point than ever before.

Make sure to subscribe, as we’ll be looking specifically at war profiteers in future editions.

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The billionaire list…in numbers

Another record-shattering year for the world’s richest people. Both the number and the wealth of the world’s billionaires are at their highest levels. There are now a record 3,428 billionaires worldwide. Their combined wealth is a record $20.5 trillion, equivalent to the size of mainland China’s economy. Their wealth is equivalent to 17.1% of the global GDP, compared to less than 5% in 2010.

The world’s billionaires are $4 trillion richer than 12 months ago. This is $1.5 trillion more than the combined wealth held by the poorest 4.1 billion people in the world. An increase of about a quarter. Their number increased by 400, a 13% jump. At the top, the 10 richest billionaires are 44% richer. All in all, 4 in 5 billionaires are richer than they were last year.

A trillionaire is in sight. The world’s richest person is only $160 billion shy of becoming the first trillionaire, years earlier than projected. Elon Musk has a net wealth of $839 billion, having added around half a trillion in just a year. In fact, he’s $121 billion richer than the next three richest billionaires combined, and richer than the poorest 693 billionaires.

AI boom for billionaires. 390 people entered the billionaire club with a combined net worth of $755 billion. Artificial Intelligence (AI) played a huge role in this. 45 new AI billionaires have been created over the past 12 months, accounting for more than half of the total of 86 AI billionaires.

Technology accounts for nearly a quarter of the total wealth, which has boomed over the past 12 months. The combined wealth of billionaires in the technology industry is up nearly 50%, a $1.6 trillion jump.

The US has the most billionaires and the wealthiest. This year, billionaires span 80 countries, including, for the first time, Afghanistan. Yet most billionaires are concentrated in a few countries. The United States accounts for the most billionaires in the world, with 989, or 30% of the total, and the most wealth, $8.4 trillion, or 42% of all billionaire wealth. US billionaires are 23.4% richer than a year ago, having added $1.6 trillion to their stock of wealth.

Some countries recorded a massive increase in billionaires’ wealth. Irish billionaires are 254% richer, those in the Netherlands 243%, Canada’s 111%, Brazil’s 81%, and those in Sweden 47%.

Billionaire gender divide. It’s well known that, globally and in many countries, women own less than men. And that’s true at the very top. Women account for 14% of the total billionaire class.

More wealth at the top, increasing suffering for many. As billionaires’ wealth hit $20 trillion, much of the world’s population faces immense suffering. Some 2.3 billion people in the world are regularly facing hunger, 2.8 billion people have no adequate housing, and 2 billion are facing catastrophic out-of-pocket health spending.

Not just the wealth that should worry us. It’s not just trillions of wealth in the hands of a few, but also its impact on democratic institutions. Increasingly, we are seeing billionaires concentrate media ownership to serve their selfish interests. They are hijacking our public institutions and democracy, as we showed in this year’s Davos paper.

Something to read and listen to

Listen to K. R. Ghodsee on Equals talking about Capitalism vs Socialism: What’s Better for Women’s Rights?

Listen to Zoe Gardner and Sharon Ekambaram on how How Migrants Are Used as Scapegoats for the Real Crisis

Read Ken Opalo’s analysis of the short and medium term impacts of the U.S./Israel-Iran war.

Read what the IMF have to say about how extreme inequality is fueling a global debt crisis.

Here are some of the main takeaways!

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Inequality in Mexico…in numbers

Today, Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The richest 1% of the population (just 1.3 million people!) earn 35% of total income, hold 40% of the country’s private wealth, and are responsible for 23% of polluting emissions.

At the same time, 18.8 million people live without access to nutritious and quality food, 38.5 million live in social deprivation or below the poverty line, and 21 million women devote at least a full workday to unpaid care work.

Over the past 30 years, extreme wealth concentration in Mexico has consolidated. Mexico’s ultra-rich have never been as numerous or as rich as they are today. There are 22 billionaires with a combined fortune of 219 billion dollars, roughly equivalent to Qatar’s GDP.

Mexico confirms what Thomas Piketty argued in Capital in the Twenty-First Century: when the fortunes of the richest grow faster than the economy, economic inequality deepens. Between 1996 and 2025, Carlos Slim’s wealth increased more than eightfold, and billionaire wealth grew 4.2 times, while the Mexican economy did not even double in size. This model has been mediocre for the majority, but extraordinarily profitable for billionaires.

Recent experience shows that change is possible. Thanks to strong collective and democratic decisions by the government since 2017, the minimum wage has increased, which has made a big difference, although it is still far too low. Nevertheless, public investment as a share of GDP in 2024 was still less than half of what it was 45 years ago. Despite the growing concentration of wealth, the private sector invests less than $8 for every $100 dollars earned. Restoring public investment and democratically directing it toward the development of social and productive infrastructure are indispensable conditions for fair and redistributive growth. Economic democracy is not decreed: it is built.

The nine proposals included in the report seek to transform, repair, and redistribute so that the benefits of the Mexican economy cease to be controlled and concentrated by a few:

• Mobilize investment flows in a fair and democratic manner.

• Strengthen rights protection mechanisms.

• Expand the mandates of economic policy regulatory bodies.

• Showcase and address billionaire fiscal irresponsibility.

• Promote inclusive care policies through collective participation.

• Advance a new democratic governance of water as a human right.

• Develop social infrastructure for the redistribution of care.

• Reallocate the electricity subsidy so that it is progressive.

• Finance electric mass public transportation in a progressive manner.

In the current international context, Oxfam Mexico says, these policies mean diversifying trade and investment, reducing US dependence, prioritising the domestic market, and building the state capacities necessary to seize new growth opportunities.

Taking measures in response to concentrated economic power in Mexico is not a threat to development: it is the only way to consolidate the social advances achieved in recent years and expand them for the benefit of the majority.

Thank you to the Oxfam Mexico team for their brilliant data-driven analysis and evidence-based policy solutions.

Something to read and listen to

Read the report by Oxfam Mexico (only in Spanish for now, but English translation coming soon!)

Listen to Alexandra Haas, Oxfam Mexico’s executive director.

Chart of the week from KPMG showing how the share of the economy going to profits rather than wages has reached a post-WWII high.

Read this UNU Wider report about how global profit shifting contributes to cross-country inequalities.

Complete complacency on the part of creditors is letting the problem fester, rather than acting now to tackle this crisis. That means more austerity for the populations of low-income countries, more people going hungry, more suffering for the sick, more care work for women, blighted futures for youths… and higher bills for creditor countries’ taxpayers when debt crises eventually flare up.

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Debt in numbers

5.2 billion people live in countries where debt payments are higher than total social spending. The World Bank rates over half of low-income countries as “at high risk of debt distress” or “in debt distress”. The Sustainable Development Goals – UN targets to eradicate extreme poverty and reduce inequality – have become out of reach.

Climate finance hits a wall. While there are efforts underway to reform multilateral development banks in order to expand their lending capacity, too little attention is paid to borrowing capacity. At least 47 out of 66 low-income countries would need to take on too much external debt within five years to meet global climate and development goals. Climate finance should take the form of grants, not loans.

Meanwhile, rich creditors are doing fine, thank you very much. Rich private creditors earn a risk premium when they buy low-income countries’ sovereign debt. It is so high that they tend to make a profit even in the few cases of defaults. Debt Justice-UK estimates that rich bondholders of six countries that recently restructured their debt made an average profit of 38% (over the entire duration of their investment) despite the “haircuts” they conceded.

The G20’s debt relief offer is half-hearted. In the midst of the pandemic, the G20 postponed low-income countries’ debt payments, which was a good thing. It then created a permanent mechanism to forgive their unsustainable sovereign debt: the so-called Common Framework. This is completely failing to deliver.

Only four countries have applied for debt relief under the Common Framework. There are a range of reasons why overindebted governments fail to raise their hands to get relief:

• Too little: The Common Framework is too stingy. After a country falls off the debt cliff, the Common Framework offers just enough relief to put it back right at the edge of the cliff, not at a safe distance. Zambia did get relief… only to remain “at high risk of debt distress”. The current review of the World Bank and IMF’s Debt Sustainability Framework is an opportunity to right that wrong.

• Too slow: It took four years of excruciating negotiations for Zambia to get that relief – and it’s still negotiating with some marginal creditors. The Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable – an informal global governance body advising the G20 – has made progress to streamline and speed up debt restructuring processes. But creditors are responding with ever more complex debt contracts that are likely to complicate future debt restructurings.

• Too risky: There is no equivalent to corporate bankruptcy law for sovereign debt. When a government fails to pay its creditors, the latter can sue in London or New York court (where contracts are usually signed) and almost certainly win. That shuts off debtor governments from global financial markets. The prospect of such lawsuits gives creditors huge leverage in negotiations with governments.

• Too late: Debtor countries’ Finance Ministers tend to kick the can down the road and let their successors bite the bullet of debt restructuring, as they fear the credit rating downgrade (even though their low ratings already price them out of the market anyway) and perceive default as shameful.

Twenty years ago, after a decade of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, creditor countries made a debt relief offer that debtor countries could not refuse: cancelling over $100 billion of debt. It is time to repeat that feat, otherwise the debt problem will continue to fester and stunt the fight against inequality and climate change.

This time, however, it will be important to complement debt cancellation with the creation of a legal framework for sovereign debt in order to stop the cycle of debt crises.

Something to read and listen to

Read this report by Matthew Martin and David Waddock about resolving the debt crisis.

Listen to Matthew on this week’s Equals Podcast

and read his blog

In this week’s Bulletin, we’re diving into Oxfam’s latest inequality report on the political influence of the super-rich.

If you haven’t already, then check out part 1 on how billionaire wealth has reached a historic high.

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Economic inequality becomes political inequality…in numbers

Buying politics. Billionaires have long used their vast wealth to “buy” politicians and political parties. In the US, just 100 billionaire families poured a record-breaking US$2.6bn into federal elections in 2024. Wealth gives the super-rich the power to hijack public policies - one study, using data from 136 countries, found that as income inequality increases, policies increasingly favour the rich.

The World Values Survey found that almost half of all people surveyed say that “the rich often buy elections” in their country. The rich agree - nearly 80 percent of millionaires think super-rich buy political influence

Control of the media. Billionaires dominate media and social media companies. Of the world’s 10 largest media and press companies, 7 have billionaire owners. Every day, people across the world spend 11.8 billion hours (over one million years combined) consuming content on social media platforms founded by billionaires. Buying the media has allowed the super-rich to extend their political power; shape public discourse; and legitimise their accumulation of wealth and power, as well as an economic system that enables the billionaire class.

Taking a seat at the table. The super-rich are also at the forefront of political power. This is happening at local, national and global levels. A 2023 study found that over 11% of the world’s billionaires had held or sought political office. Oxfam estimates that billionaires are at least 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people.

With every billionaire president, cabinet member and political appointee, it has become less shocking to see rich people being appointed to political positions.

Driving an anti-rights agenda. A network of far-right and conservative forces, allied with billionaires, is accused of driving a backlash against human rights and progressive policies and ideas. One way they are doing this is through funding far-right groups and political parties. According to Global Philanthropy Project, in 2021 to 2022 the income of just three anti-LGBTQI+ organizations was greater than more than 8,000 LGBTQI+ organizations globally in the same time period.

Political poverty. People living in poverty lack the time and money to participate fully in political life and face bureaucratic hurdles. Women, in particular, experience acute time poverty because of the unequal care responsibilities they face.

In low-income countries 45% of people in the least wealthy quintile lack ID, which is often a prerequisite for voting. In the US during the 2016 presidential elections, voters in Black neighbourhoods waited 29% longer to vote than those in white neighbourhoods.

Protests against inequality. In the last twelve months, over 142 significant anti-government protests have erupted worldwide. One global study of protests between 2006 and 2020 identifies failures of political representation as the largest driver of dissent, and economic justice – including inequality and austerity – as the second.

We’ve covered the youth-led protests that erupted in Kenya against IMF-imposed austerity measures extensively.

The economic and political power of the rich can be cut down to size. And the majority can take back political power, force government action to end economic inequality, and build a fairer and more sustainable future for all.

Read the full Oxfam report here.

Something to listen to

Listen to this week’s Equals episode, where we speak with three activists from Kenya, Nepal, and France who explain what drove them to the streets to fight for their cause and the brutal violence they met from the state.

This year’s Oxfam inequality report sets out how 2025 has been an absolutely bumper year for the super-rich. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3,000 for the first time, and billionaire wealth is now higher than at any time in history. Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger.

The core message of the report is about how the super-rich buy political power and erode the rights of the many. We’ll cover that part of the report in next week’s Bulletin, so remember to subscribe if you’re not already.

This week, we’re focusing on section 1 of the paper, the great inequality divide.

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The great inequality divide…in numbers

A great decade for billionaires. 2025 was another record-breaking year for billionaires. For the first time, their number reached 3,000, and as of November 2025, their wealth reached a new high of $18.3bn. Since Donald Trump came to office, their wealth increased three times faster than the past five-year average. Trump’s agenda of championing deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation has benefited the richest everywhere.

Mega time for millionaires. In 2024, more than 680,000 dollar millionaires were created globally, with 5.34 million new millionaires projected over the next five years. The poorest half of humanity holds just 0.52% of the world’s wealth, while the richest 1% own 43.8%

Meanwhile, billions face poverty and hunger. One in four people globally face hunger, increasing by 42.6% between 2015 and 2024. 92 million food-insecure people live in Europe and North America, some of the richest regions in the world.

Since 2020, poverty reduction has largely ground to a halt, with poverty rising again in Africa. In 2022, nearly half of the world population (48%), or 3.83 billion people, lived in poverty. If current trajectories hold, 2.9 billion people, or a third of the global population, will still be living in poverty in 2050.

A small redistribution of wealth would be enough to prevent this injustice; just 65% of billionaires’ wealth gained over the past year would end global poverty (at US$8.30 per day).

Rising debt and aid cuts leave a trail of destruction. Many countries in the Global South are grappling with a profound debt crisis driven by high interest rates and worsening economic conditions. 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on education or health. In Africa, spending on debt servicing is 150% greater on average than the combined spending on education, healthcare and social protection. Cuts to aid budgets have directly hit people living in poverty and could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.

Vital public services made unaffordable and inaccessible. Currently, 2.8 billion people around the world lack adequate housing, with 1.12 billion living in slums and informal settlements. In low-income countries, 33% of school-age children and young people are out of school, and across low- and lower-middle-income countries, children in the least wealthy 20% are four to five times more likely to be out of school than those in the richest 20%.

Essential public services are not only woefully underfunded – they are being corroded by policies and narratives shaped by super-rich corporate interests that erroneously position the private sector as more efficient.

Economic inequality leads to political inequality. When a billionaire buys a politician, a newspaper or impunity from justice, it gives them tremendous influence over all our futures, undermining political freedom and eroding the rights of the many. Rising inequality leads to a higher risk of democracy being undermined, and that inequality is one of the strongest predictors of democratic backsliding. The most unequal countries are as much as seven times more likely to see this happen than more equal countries.

More on how the rich undermine democracy, and how to build a more equal future in next week’s Bulletin.

Read the full report

Something to read/listen to

Listen to Equals Podcast, with Gary Stevenson, Citibank trader turned wealth tax champion on wealth inequality, economic failure and why we must tax the rich now

Read Oxfam CEO, Amitabh Behar on ‘How to build a future that benefits everyone’.

Watch some of the best Oxfam campaign videos from this week

Our friends at the UK’s High Pay Centre are famous for their annual Fat Cat Day; this year, it took just two days for the average FTSE 100 CEO to make what the average UK worker will make all year.

We shamelessly pinched this idea to create Pollutocrat Day, the moment when the richest 1% use up their carbon budget. This is the amount of CO2 that can be emitted while staying within 1.5 degrees of warming. Just 10 days into the New Year, and we’ve already hit that moment!

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Pollutocrat day…in numbers

The carbon budget. There is very little of it remaining CO2 that can be emitted while staying within 1.5 degrees of warming. At current rates, there’s a good chance that the budget will be used up in just a couple of years.

The richest are blowing through the carbon budget. The 2030 emissions level compatible with 1.5 °C is 17.8 GtCO2. Divide that by 8.5 billion people (the projected global population in 2030), and you get an approximate per-person annual carbon budget of 2.1 tonnes CO2. Given that the richest 1% emit about 200 kg per day, this means their share of the budget is gone in 10 days. The top 0.1% used their budget by the 3^rd January.

In contrast, someone in the bottom 50% emits less than 800kg of CO2 per year, meaning they use the annual carbon budget every 2.6 years.

A fair share? Given that this 2.1 tonnes per person divides emissions equally among all individuals, it would be reasonable to question whether this is a fair way of sharing the budget. A fair share should really incorporate considerations of historical emissions and capacity to act, meaning the budget of the richest should be even lower and the poorest higher.

Climate inequality kills. The emissions generated by the richest 1% in one year alone are estimated to cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths by the end of the century. Decades of overconsumption by the world’s super-rich are also causing significant economic damage to low and lower-middle-income countries, which could add up to $44 trillion by 2050.

Deep cuts needed. To stay within the 1.5 degrees limit, by 2030, the richest 10% would have to slash their emissions by 90%, the 1% by 97%, and the 0.1% by 99%. On the other hand, the poorest 50% could increase their emissions by 63% to reach 2.1 tonnes CO2 per year.

Yet, one of the most shocking findings of our latest research is that the wrong group are cutting emissions. Since 1990, the richest 0.1% have increased their share of total emissions by 32%, whilst the poorest half of humanity has actually seen their share of emissions fall by 3%.

Not just direct emissions. Our Climate Plunder report makes it crystal clear - a powerful few use their economic and political influence to lock the world into disaster. They riddle negotiation spaces like COP with their lobbyists, sue governments for doing the right thing, spread climate disinformation, and finance hate to promote their fossil fuel interests. Their investments are financing the climate breakdown, with almost 60% of the billionaire investments classified as being in high climate-impact sectors, such as mining or oil and gas companies.

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Something to read and listen to

Listen to the latest Equals Podcast with Thomas Piketty on The Great Global Wealth Transfer

Read that billionaire Jensen Huang Says He’s ‘Perfectly Fine’ With California’s Billionaire Tax.

Listen to Why Economists Should Care About Inequality, with Branko Milanovic.

In the space of a few weeks, we’ve had:

• COP30, where the President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, quoted Oxfam’s research, putting climate inequality on the centre stage. Ultimately, the conference ended in more heartbreak than hope. Read last week’s bulletin on Oxfam’s report if you missed it.

• The G20 hosted by South Africa, where the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, put the inequality crisis firmly on the agenda. The final communique was watered down, with countries clearly spooked by the ghost of President Trump. More on this below.

• The World Social Summit (WSSD) in Doha, Qatar, where the Doha Political Declaration was adopted, centring social development on poverty eradication, full and productive employment and decent work for all, and social inclusion.

• The UN tax convention in Nairobi continued negotiations for the first UN tax convention.

What have we missed? Comment below!

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Oxfam’s ‘big heads’ might have been getting quite a lot of use recently, but it does feel like all these negotiations are happening over each other, rather than with each other.

In this week’s Bulletin, we start with a look at what happened at the G20, then put a spotlight on a new Oxfam report on Kenya’s inequality crisis.

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G20

Standing up to bullies. President Ramaphosa and the South African government set an example to the world in ensuring the G20 stood firm and collectively agreed on a leader’s declaration – defending multilateralism – despite U.S. strong-arming.

Rich countries and their allies did water down the communique, clearly spooked by the ghost of President Trump. The communique does not reflect the clear momentum worldwide for taxing the super-rich established during the Brazilian G20 presidency in 2024. Nevertheless, the agreement was a clear victory for South Africa and for multilateralism

History made on inequality. This was the first ever meeting of world leaders where the inequality emergency was put at the centre of the agenda. This too is a testament to South Africa’s leadership – one that put the billions before the billionaires. Arguably, the biggest legacy of the South African G20 could be the beginning of the road for the creation of a new International Panel on Inequality- an Inequality IPCC- with the leaders of Norway, Spain, Brazil and South Africa all signalling their support together with the European Council and the AU.

Kenya’s inequality crisis

Read the report here

Extreme poverty in the face of economic growth. Since 2015, an additional seven million Kenyans have fallen into extreme poverty, an increase of 37%. Severe and moderate food insecurity rose by 17 million between 2014 and 2024, an increase of 71%. The cost of food is 50% higher than it was in 2020.

This has been accompanied, however, by a decade of 5% per year real-term economic growth (excluding 2020).

Growth for the rich. The richest 125 Kenyans hold more wealth than 77% of the population, equivalent to 42.6 million people. The richest 1% own 78% of Kenya’s total financial wealth. This clearly shows that without redistribution, growth alone will continue to enrich the richest while deepening poverty for the majority.

Women are hit hardest. Women earn just KSh 65 for every KSh 100 earned by men, and are five times more likely to engage in unpaid care work, and face significant barriers in land ownership. Only 13% of women hold legal rights to agricultural land, dropping to 4% among women in the poorest households. Asset ownership in male-headed households is three times higher than in female-headed households.

Inequality in public services. Education, health and social protection structures are chronically underfunded.

Children from the poorest 20% of households receive almost five fewer years of schooling than those from the richest 20%. When adjusted for inflation, the amount of money per pupil that the government spends on primary schools is equivalent to just 18% of what it was worth in 2003.

The Social Health Insurance Fund is unaffordable for many and has benefited private healthcare providers the most. In 2022, only 20% of National Health Insurance money went to public health facilities.

Only 9% of Kenyans are covered by at least one form of social protection. Among the poorest, only a fifth receive social assistance.

Debt repayments over social spending. In 2024, out of every 100 shillings collected in taxes, 68 shillings were used to repay debt. This is double the amount in 2017. Debt repayment is twice the education budget and nearly 15 times the national health budget.

Taxing the poor. Kenya’s tax system is over-reliant on regressive VAT/sales taxes, which means that people who spend nearly all their income on basic items are paying more in taxes, as a share of their income, than their wealthier counterparts. In 2023, the government introduced new flat-rate taxes on housing and health, which mainly affected low-income earners, and gave property owners some breathing space by reducing the tax rate on rental income by 2.5 percentage points.

Inequality protests. IMF-imposed austerity measures, such as tax hikes that affect people on lower incomes and government budget cuts, are further widening the gap between the rich and the rest. Inequality was at the heart of the nationwide protests in June 2024.

The colonial legacy. Today, neo-colonial systems of domination reproduce colonial injustices. The dominance of the IMF in shaping the country’s economic policy, exploitative practices, including on trade and tax avoidance by Multinational Corporations, and the dominance of debtor interest in the global financial architecture continue to shape inequality in Kenya.

Something to read/listen to/watch

Read Oxfam’s Rune Møller Stahl’s ‘In Denmark, Social Democracy Is Failing’

Listen to the Equals podcast with Anna Marriott and Dr. Aquina Thulare on healthcare financialization and the fight for universal health.

And in lighter news, ‘How one man accidentally became the richest man of all time, a multi-quadrillionaire!’

It’s easy to slide into despair, but here's what’s giving us hope at COP:

• Bam! The Belém Action Mechanism is a proposal for a just transition that protects workers’ rights and ensures equity and justice are at the heart of the fossil fuel phaseout. It seeks to guarantee that workers and communities—especially in the poorest parts of the world—are not left behind. Countries representing 80% of the world’s population have already signalled their support!

• The power of the people. Indigenous communities from Brazil, Latin America, and across the globe, alongside civil society allies, are marching for justice. They are demanding urgent action to protect our planet’s future and voicing their anger at governments and fossil fuel industries that continue to block progress.

This week’s Bulletin is part 2 of the climate plunder series is about how the super-rich use their political and economic clout to lock the world into climate disaster.

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Climate power inequality…in numbers

Climate inequality on the centre stage. At COP29, António Guterres, UN Secretary-General highlighted Oxfam's climate inequality research to world leaders in his opening address. At COP30, President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, shared Oxfam’s headline stat with a message to tax the wealth of the super-rich.

COP is riddled with lobbyists. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a fossil fuel lobbyist at COP30. They outnumber all delegations except Brazil; 1 in 25 attendees is a fossil fuel lobbyist, research from the Kick Big Polluters Out found last week. An Oxfam investigation with the Guardian found that one in four billionaires at COP28 made their fortunes in highly polluting industries such as oil, gas, mining or chemicals.

Litigation terrorism by the super-rich. It’s not just lobbying. Investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are being widely used by the rich to hold back climate action. ISDSs are established in many investment treaties and allow corporations to sue countries that harm their profits by introducing new rules. They are typically brought against low- and middle-income countries by rich corporations and individuals. $120bn of public money was won by corporations in ISDS courts, with $84bn going to fossil-fuel corporates and $7.8bn to mining corporates.

Corporate-sponsored misinformation. Fossil fuel corporations have been found to adopt the same tactics as the tobacco industry, spending millions on networks of advocacy organisations spreading climate disinformation. The Koch brothers, who made their fortune in the fossil-fuel industry, gave over $145m to 90 organisations that attack climate science and policy solutions from 1997 to 2018. In France, billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin was reported to be investing €150m to bolster the far right, while the CNews network was bought by far-right fossil-fuel billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who rebranded it as the French equivalent of Fox News. The channel was fined €80,000 in 2024 for broadcasting climate misinformation.

Financing hate to promote fossil-fuel interests? In 2018, donations to anti-climate change action groups totalled $808m, with family foundations providing significant amounts of these donations. Wealthy donors are also secretly funding far-right and white supremacist movements, which spread racism, anti-transgender and misogynistic views, and are more likely to support politicians with regressive climate agendas.

Are wealthy individuals, many of whom have fossil-fuel interests, using hatred to build support for poisonous politicians whom they can count on to introduce anti-climate policies?

Financing the climate breakdown. Billionaires dominate every aspect of the global economy, controlling 17 of the 50 largest listed corporates in the world, either as CEO or principal investor. Oxfam’s research uncovered the investment portfolios of 308 billionaires. It found that:

• In 2024, the investment emissions of the 308 billionaires totalled 586 million tonnes of CO2e, more than the combined emissions of 118 countries; if they were personified as a country, then they would rank as the fifteenth-most polluting country in the world, ahead of South Africa.

• On average, a billionaire’s annual per capita investment emissions are 1.9 million tonnes of CO2e, which is 346,000 times more than the average person. These billionaires would have to circumnavigate the world almost 10,000 times in their private jets to emit this much.

• Two-thirds of the corporates they invest in are not aligned with the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target, and one-third have decarbonisation plans aligned to a 4°C world.

• They tend to invest in much more polluting corporates than average. For every $1m invested, billionaire investments produce over two and a half times more emissions than the S&P 1,200. Almost 60% of the billionaire investments are classified as being in high climate-impact sectors, such as mining or oil and gas companies, compared to 49% for the S&P 1,200, and 14% of their wealth is from corporates with fossil-fuel revenue, compared to 9% for the S&P 1,200 – a 55% higher share.

• Billionaires could direct their investments towards less climate-damaging corporations. If they instead chose an investment fund which prioritises good environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, they could cut their emissions by 23 times.

Read the full report here (available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and the summary in Arabic)

The workings behind the stats can be found in the methodology note here.

Something to read and listen to

Listen to Marinel Ubaldo on Equals, taking us inside the night Typhoon Haiyan hit, how her community rebuilt, and the extraordinary human-rights case she helped push forward to hold fossil fuel giants to account.

Read the report from the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Inequality who presented their report to President Ramaphosa in Cape Town last week. They will present their findings at the G20 Leaders’ Summit on 22/23 November. 500 top economists have come out in support of an international panel on inequality.

Read Oxfam’s Rebecca Riddell ‘A ‘Golden Age of America’? More Like Trump’s Gilded Age’

Ahead of the Summit, a statement by the Public Services coalition was endorsed by 111 organisations, calling for social development to be prioritised over the coming month, including at the WSSD, COP, the G20 and the start of the negotiations for the UN Tax Convention. At the same time, GCAP adopted the Peoples’ Declaration for Social Justice, calling for a new global social contract.

Despite the lack of global attention, it was heartening to see thousands of people come to Doha for the World Summit for Social Development and the depth of some of the conversations that happened.

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A mountain to climb. The summit was always going to struggle to be noticed, with the world distracted on so many fronts. But, arguably, it was more evaded than eclipsed. The worst cuts to aid in history, including massive cuts to health, mean that donor countries have lots to hide and little to celebrate. In fact, they should be hanging their heads in shame.

Engines of equality. This is a terrible shame, because health, education, social protection and indeed other social services can be powerful engines of equality - for governments keen to close the gap between the rich and the rest there is not many other thing that can be done that are more successful, or indeed more popular with the public; at a time when addressing the anger of Gen Z is becoming more and more important for survival.

Publicly good. Public services are underfunded. Almost half of humanity lives in countries that spend more on servicing interest on debt than on health or education. In 2024, Oxfam highlighted that 84 percent of countries have cut investment in education, health and social protection. Nine out of ten countries have backtracked in one or more areas.

The services that work are public, universal, and free at the point of use. The evidence is overwhelming, and the stories of success are truly heartening. Take Thailand. They introduced universal health coverage in 2002 for their population of 65 million people, with a per capita income similar to that of the US in 1930. Over 80% of all care is delivered by the state. Funded by progressive taxation, quality health services are available free to everyone and benefit the poorest people most.

Privately bad. Yet the advice of the World Bank and others for decades has been the opposite: to promote the private provision of services, and to get people to pay for them, either up front with fees, or through insurance schemes. There is a clear risk that this trend would only grow as aid shrinks. Indeed, the Social Summit itself alarmingly called for a greater focus on Public-Private Partnerships for healthcare as a solution. As Oxfam and Bloomberg have documented, this has directly fuelled human rights abuses, whether in education or health. Patients are routinely turned into prisoners, held in hospitals until bills can be paid, or the bodies of loved ones are kept in the morgue until money is found to pay. And beyond the headline horror stories, the simple fact of hundreds of millions unable to get education or medicines because they cannot pay. Meanwhile, in the last year, a total of 50 new health and pharmaceutical billionaires were minted, as private health and medicine continue to deliver dividends for those at the top. Such inequality has been shown to drive pandemics in a new report released this week.

Just plain mean. Social protection schemes have also suffered from decades of wrong advice, insisting that governments spend time and money trying to means-test benefits, only giving them to poor people. Maybe it makes sense on paper, but it is virtually impossible in practice and cruelly excludes so many who need help. At the same time, services targeted only at the poor are invariably poor services, as the middle classes go private and see no value in paying taxes to pay for public services they don’t use. This also ignores the history of virtually all Global North countries, where the most successful benefits are those that are universal, grants for all children, or for all mothers, or for all pensioners- their universality making them hugely popular with the whole of society; not just in their own right, but in a broader sense of creating a social contract and holding the state and society together- pretty important aims right now in almost every country.

The summit outcome. Three days and over 200 (!) physical events later, the Summit concluded. The Doha Political Declaration was adopted, which renewed leaders’ commitment to the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration and the SDG agenda, centring social development on the three pillars of poverty eradication, full and productive employment and decent work for all, and social inclusion.

The consensus. That inequality is a critical issue. There is an emerging political agreement that it is time for a more meaningful commitment to action on universal social protection. There is a surprising degree of agreement among UN agencies, political leaders and civil society about the urgency of having a more coordinated strategy on public services.

The tension. The continued tendency to look to the private sector for solutions. There is also a tension between development as usual and responding to the tectonic shifts taking place in the development landscape at the global level.

The Social Summit was the start of a journey, not the end of it. As the global spotlight moves to the COP, states and international actors gathered there must focus on inequality reduction and recognise that comprehensive support for public services is central to the ‘justice’ involved in a ‘just transition’ and must ensure that climate finance also supports the expansion and resilience of publicly delivered essential services.

In other news…

Committee storms the Cape. Meanwhile, Professor Joseph Stiglitz and his Extraordinary Committee have presented their Inequality report to President Cyril Ramaphosa in Cape Town, in a move covered widely around the world. Whilst not wearing capes, the findings of Stiglitz and his brave committee members are indeed extraordinary. Whilst global wealth has more than doubled since 2000, for every dollar of new wealth created, the super-rich got 41 cents, whilst the bottom half of humanity got 1 cent. And core to their recommendations for fighting inequality- public services for all and universal social protection.

An Inequality IPCC?

The committee rightly highlights that the world faces an inequality emergency, on a par with the climate emergency, and that indeed the two emergencies are closely linked. To tackle the Inequality Emergency, they call for the establishment of a new International Panel on Inequality, something President Ramaphosa supported strongly and has committed to championing with his fellow G20 governments- the next few weeks will see whether this recommendation becomes a reality.

Something to read and watch

Read Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s boss in Al Jazeera- Gen Z are demanding schools and hospitals, not super yachts and helicopters.

Watch Zohran Mamdani’s barnstorming acceptance speech winning the Mayoralty of New York City. ‘Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns-these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.’

Read Oxfam in Asia’s latest inequality report, “An Unequal Future. Asia’s Struggle for Justice in a Warming, Wired World”