Featured image for “Want to tackle inequality? Start with fair taxes and giving the Global South a real voice at the IMF and World Bank”

Want to tackle inequality? Start with fair taxes and giving the Global South a real voice at the IMF and World Bank

January 22, 2025
Global inequality will continue to spiral in a skewed system of international finance and governance that heavily favours the Global North, says Anthony Kamande in the latest blog in our Davos series.
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Featured image for “Who wants to be a trillionaire? How Oxfam worked out five men could win the ultimate wealth prize”

Who wants to be a trillionaire? How Oxfam worked out five men could win the ultimate wealth prize

January 21, 2025
Alex Maitland takes us through the number-crunching behind the headline prediction from this year’s Davos report: that there will be five trillionaires within a decade.
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Featured image for “Get ready for the new trillionaire class: whose wealth will be built not on merit but inheritance, monopoly – and the legacy of colonialism”

Get ready for the new trillionaire class: whose wealth will be built not on merit but inheritance, monopoly – and the legacy of colonialism

January 20, 2025
The world looks set to see five trillionaires within a decade — and more billionaires are now being created through inheritance than entrepreneurialism. Anjela Taneja and Harry Bignell introduce Oxfam’s 2025 Davos report, which reveals the scale of unearned wealth — and how those riches are built on a colonial legacy of exploitative global systems.
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Featured image for “Global South feminists know how our fixation with GDP hurts people and planet: it’s time to listen to them”

Global South feminists know how our fixation with GDP hurts people and planet: it’s time to listen to them

December 20, 2024
The world needs to stop relying on a metric that ignores two thirds of the work done by women and which promotes harmful policies, says Oxfam GB CEO Halima Begum. A new collection of feminist think pieces offers a compelling and inspirational tour of the arguments and pathways for moving Beyond GDP.
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Featured image for “It’s time to put care at the centre of our economics courses”

It’s time to put care at the centre of our economics courses

November 19, 2024
The UK government’s Francis Review of the English school curriculum is an unprecedented chance to shift the national and global conversation on economics education: let’s not miss it, say Alex Bush and Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann. They explain why we need to change an economics curriculum which perpetuates narratives that are bad for people and planet and erase care work.
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Featured image for “Talking to aid economists about localization”

Talking to aid economists about localization

October 16, 2024
Sat on a panel on localization last week in a meeting of aid economists (no more detail, sorry – Chatham House Rule). It was definitely a different tone to the usual conversation on localization, which concentrates on issues of power, equity, decolonization etc. Here, there was a striking focus on efficiency/value for money, which is of course what floats economists’
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Are we allowed to be unimpressed by Nobel prize winners? Hope so.

October 14, 2024
When I heard that the not-quite-Nobel for economics this year had gone to Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Simon Johnson I went back to my 2012 review of their breakthrough book, Why Nations Fail. At the time, I had really mixed feelings about it – loved the emphasis on conclusions, but detected an extraordinary level of Western bias on which
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Featured image for “State of the World (According to The Economist)”

State of the World (According to The Economist)

September 26, 2024
Two excellent (gated) longer essays in last week’s Economist that I thought I would excerpt for you. The first was a graphic and alarming summary of the argument that ‘The world’s poorest countries have experienced a brutal decade’. Some extracts: ‘There are now a billion fewer people subsisting on less than $2.15 a day than in 2000. [But] almost all of
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Featured image for “Forgetting Rana Plaza”

Forgetting Rana Plaza

April 24, 2024
Guest post from Naomi Hossain, from SOAS, on the 11th anniversary of the tragedy in Bangladesh Despite heated and even violent contention around monuments and memorials in recent years, the politics of memory are still seen as largely symbolic. Apparel industry workers can tell you that this is wrong: memorials matter materially. For survivors of the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster,
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Featured image for “The Battle for Tax Justice will be fought country by country: here are five useful tips for activists”

The Battle for Tax Justice will be fought country by country: here are five useful tips for activists

April 4, 2024
Guest post from Paolo de Renzio, introducing his new (Open Access) book Taxes are funny. Most people think that they pay too much, and that others don’t pay enough. Many often try to pay less of them, but they also complain about the poor quality of the public services they fund. Politicians get credit for saying they will not raise
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Featured image for “RIP Father Frans von Hoff – the co-founder of the Fairtrade Movement”

RIP Father Frans von Hoff – the co-founder of the Fairtrade Movement

March 11, 2024
Guest post from Kelly Hawrylyshyn, Head of Global Resource Mobilization at Fairtrade International; and Harriet Lamb (CEO WRAP, former CEO of Fairtrade International & Fairtrade Foundation UK) On February 13th, the Fair Trade movement mourned the passing away of the liberation-theology worker-priest,  Father Frans von der Hoff,  the co-founder of a global movement that now generates over €8 billion in
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Featured image for “Thirty Years of Anti-Corruption: A Personal Reflection”

Thirty Years of Anti-Corruption: A Personal Reflection

March 5, 2024
Journalist, activist and anti-corruption legend John Githongo reflects on the shifting story of anti-corruption in Africa, from Western models to new agendas. This is an edited-down version of a piece published in The Elephant. Corruption, however you define it, is so integral to the way human commercial and political affairs play out that all major global developments in its regard
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