2023-07-19 06:55:09
As economists and policy makers committed to tackling extreme inequality around the world, we call on your leadership to ensure that the United Nations, through its Sustainable Development Goals, and the World Bank support new goals. and vital strategic indicators, allowing to redouble efforts to fight against growing extreme inequalities.
We live in a time of extraordinarily high economic inequality. Extreme poverty and extreme wealth have increased sharply and simultaneously for the first time in twenty-five years. Between 2019 and 2020, global inequality grew faster than at any time since World War II.
The richest 10% of the world’s population currently receives 52% of global income, while the poorest half of the population earns only 8.5%. Billions of people face the dire hardship of rising food prices and hunger, while the number of billionaires has doubled over the past decade.
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We know that high inequality undermines all of our social and environmental goals. The 2006 World Development Report and many other studies have shown that the extreme inequalities we see today have a destructive effect on society. They corrode our politics, destroy trust, hamper our collective economic prosperity and weaken multilateralism. We also know that without their sharp reduction, the twin goals of ending poverty while preventing climate breakdown will clearly be in tension.
No adequate supervision
In 2015, all the governments of the world took a historic decision by setting a sustainable development goal to reduce inequalities (SDG10). However, and moreover following the Covid-19 pandemic and then the global inflation crisis, inequalities have worsened in many respects. SDG10 remains largely ignored. Equally troubling, the main focus of this project, based on the World Bank’s Shared Prosperity Goal, does not adequately measure or monitor key aspects of inequality. Household survey data shows that one in five countries with a positive trend in “shared prosperity” have simultaneously seen inequality increase according to other indicators, such as the Palma ratio (an inequality indicator invented in 2011 by the Chilean economist Gabriel Palma), including in countries such as Mongolia, Chile or Vietnam.
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