
October 17, 2023
Guest post by Arief Anshory Yusuf, Zuzy Anna, Ahmad Komarulzaman and Andy Sumner Today, October 17th is the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (you already knew that, right?). In new analysis for UNU-WIDER, we assess progress towards the global poverty-related SDGs, specifically monetary poverty, undernutrition, child and maternal mortality, and access to clean water and basic sanitation.
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A historic global agreement on tax is under threat. Hereâs why.
August 22, 2023
This post by Farida Bena was originally published on the Kiliza website Every year, an estimated USD 312 billion are lost in unpaid corporate taxes around the world. By using legal loopholes, many companies avoid paying their dues â often to Southern countries that host their operations and provide cheap labour. This happens because the governments of those countries are unable to
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The Gross Domestic Problem: what would a new economic measure that values women and climate look like?
August 3, 2023
Measuring progress by Gross Domestic Product leads straight to gender injustice, austerity and environmental ruin. Anam Parvez Butt and Alex Bush introduce a new Oxfam discussion paper that aims to encourage debate about alternative metrics, and calls on advocates to join the âBeyond GDPâ movement Since its official adoption at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, Gross Domestic Product or
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Evaluating the Evaluations: What lessons can Oxfam draw from a Decade of Scrutiny?
July 27, 2023
Propaganda and opinion are easy; establishing the truth is hard (and I speak here as someone once branded Oxfamâs âchief opinionatorâ – thanks John Magrath). Oxfam has been wrestling with different ways to evaluate impact for decades and in a new paper, a team led by Katrina Barnes ploughed through 67 âEffectiveness Reviewsâ â rigorous impact evaluations on randomly selected
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How the United Nations and the World Bank can turbo charge the effort to reduce Inequality
July 26, 2023
Guest post from Oxfamâs Anthony Kamande Over the past decade, many leading economists and global institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have taken a keen interest in economic inequality. Tons of inequality data have been unearthed, and inequality is now on ordinary peopleâs lips. Indeed, in 2015 the UN adopted
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Showing Your Working when you come up with a âKiller Factâ
July 12, 2023
Oxfam got some headlines last week with âWorldâs 722 biggest companies âmaking $1tn in windfall profitsââ. This is a good example of a âkiller factâ â a memorable statistic that summarizes an injustice, in this case a massive windfall for big corporates at a time of global austerity and spiralling food and fuel prices. Hereâs my 2019 guide to writing
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How to get people to take the Care Economy seriously? Some top (evidence-based) tips
June 1, 2023
Been taking a look at Silvia Galandini, Anam Parvez and Nick Gadsbyâs new Oxfam new âtoolkitâ on building public pressure for change on the care economy, by constructing a âfresh and compelling narrative about the value of all careâ. The toolkit is based on research to understand how the general public across the UK thinks about paid and unpaid care
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Food and energy protests signal failures of accountability on a global scale
April 20, 2023
Guest post by Jeff Hallock and Naomi Hossain While the world was watching the war in Ukraine, its side-effects via rising food and energy prices were also playing out in the form of mass protests about the cost-of-living crisis in 148 countries. This global wave, unprecedented in world history, tells us that not only is the global economy in bad
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UK Budget 2023: What the Big Red Box leaves outÂ
March 16, 2023
British (or British adjacent) readers will by now probably have digested the main headlines of yesterdayâs budget, but Katy Chakrabortty digs deeper in this guest post. Since election manifestos tend to appear only twice a decade, party leadership pledges can be made in TV debates and quietly forgotten and the Kingâs Speech is delivered with an air of regal deference,
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Bread and roses â why Oxfam is shining a light on feminist movements this March
March 8, 2023
Victoria Stetsko introduces Oxfamâs âFeminist Powerâ campaign for International Womenâs Day, where it will be celebrating organisations across the globe fighting for rights and respect for women and queer people âHearts starve as well as bodies: give us bread, but give us roses,â sang striking women workers in the early 20th century United States. That movementâs famous demand for “Bread
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The Global role of Grandmothers in the Care Economy
February 1, 2023
In recent years, Oxfamâs been doing some pioneering work on the âcare economyâ, aka the bit Adam Smith left out (example here and here). My uninformed mental image of this had been all about the role of parents, generally mothers, in running the household and bringing up the kids, so I was struck by a recent Economist piece on the
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Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies: the politics of saving the planet
January 17, 2023
Neil McCulloch introduces his new book Hands up if you would like petrol prices to go up? Iâm guessing not too many hands. The cripplingly high costs of energy (whether petrol, diesel, gas or coal as well as electricity) have posed a huge challenge for households and firms all around the world. Massive increases in these costs, driven by the
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