Featured image for “The Gross Domestic Problem: what would a new economic measure that values women and climate look like?”

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 “Beyond GDP” 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 Oxfam’s ‘chief opinionator’ – 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 ‘Effectiveness Reviews’ – rigorous impact evaluations on randomly selected
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Featured image for “How the United Nations and the World Bank can turbo charge the effort to reduce Inequality”

How the United Nations and the World Bank can turbo charge the effort to reduce Inequality

July 26, 2023
Guest post from Oxfam’s 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 people’s lips. Indeed, in 2015 the UN adopted
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Featured image for “Showing Your Working when you come up with a ‘Killer Fact’”

Showing Your Working when you come up with a ‘Killer Fact’

July 12, 2023
Oxfam got some headlines last week with ‘World’s 722 biggest companies ‘making $1tn in windfall profits’’. This is a good example of a ‘killer fact’ – 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. Here’s my 2019 guide to writing
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Featured image for “How to get people to take the Care Economy seriously? Some top (evidence-based) tips”

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 Gadsby’s new Oxfam new ‘toolkit’ on building public pressure for change on the care economy, by constructing a ‘fresh and compelling narrative about the value of all care’. 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 out 

March 16, 2023
British (or British adjacent) readers will by now probably have digested the main headlines of yesterday’s 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 King’s Speech is delivered with an air of regal deference,
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Featured image for “Bread and roses – why Oxfam is shining a light on feminist movements this March”

Bread and roses – why Oxfam is shining a light on feminist movements this March

March 8, 2023
Victoria Stetsko introduces Oxfam’s “Feminist Power” campaign for International Women’s Day, where it will be celebrating organisations across the globe fighting for rights and respect for women and queer people “Hearts starve as well as bodies: give us bread, but give us roses,” sang striking women workers in the early 20th century United States. That movement’s famous demand for “Bread
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Featured image for “The Global role of Grandmothers in the Care Economy”

The Global role of Grandmothers in the Care Economy

February 1, 2023
In recent years, Oxfam’s been doing some pioneering work on the ‘care economy’, 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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Featured image for “Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies: the politics of saving the planet”

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?  I’m 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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Featured image for “Taxation of the World’s Super-Rich has collapsed: as 1 in 8 people go to bed hungry, that has to change”

Taxation of the World’s Super-Rich has collapsed: as 1 in 8 people go to bed hungry, that has to change

January 16, 2023
Max Lawson introduces Oxfam’s 2023 Davos report, ‘Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality’ Walter is the father of my son’s best friend at school. He works nights as a security guard at a bank in the City of London. He has three kids. They are really struggling, as the prices of everything
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Loss and Damage fund established at COP27: what happens next?

November 29, 2022
Saleemul Huq, one of the most persistent long-term advocates of a ‘loss and damage’ fund on climate change, explores the origins and potential of the breakthrough at the recent COP. For thirty years the vulnerable developing countries led by the small island states had been demanding under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) the creation of a fund
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