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.

Fancy some good news? A fascinating piece in today’s Guardian outlines the magnitude of the norm shifts that have taken place in the UK after the last 40 years, based on the latest British social attitudes (BSA) survey, which is marking its 40th year of mapping Britain’s cultural and political landscape. Underneath the left-right pendulum shifts of political debate, the

Thanks to Irene Guijt for sending over her 2021 chapter (gated, sorry – boooh!) on ‘The urgency for epistemic and political climate justice’, co-authored with Jacobo Ocharan and Velina Petrova for an edited volume, Knowledge for the Anthropocene. Don’t worry about the slightly intimidating title (confession: I always find ‘epistemic’ sending me scuttling back to the dictionary, along with ‘ontological’,

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 – often to Southern countries that host their operations and provide cheap labour. This happens because the governments of those countries are unable to

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

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

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

This post first appeared on Oxfam’s Views and Voices site. Neal Igan Roxas looks back on his childhood, and at the daily challenge for LGBTQIA+ people of “braving spaces” in the face of hostility, to explain why it is so vital the landmark SOGIE equality bill passes into law, after a two-decade battle for anti-discrimination protection. A same-sex couple at

Spent a mind-bending day this week discussing AI and development with some NGO and legal folk (Chatham House Rule, so that’s all I can say, sorry). Everyone in the room knew at least ten times more than me on the subject. Perfect. Some impressions/ideas. The catalyst for the discussion was the UK Government’s new White Paper on AI and Innovation,

I do love a ‘big book’ – one with a grand sweep, which tries to make sense of disparate events and processes, and leaves you feeling a little wiser. Think Francis Fukuyama (on the rise of the state), Ha-Joon Chang (on economics of development) or Yuen Yuen Ang (on China). I came away from Moises Naim’s latest book, The Revenge

Particularly liked the series of rather splendid blogs for International Women’s Day, written by our amazing LSE students. Here’s my favourite, not least because of the lovely blogging style: Does digitalised social protection worsen exclusion for women? by Divija Samria Here’s the deal: digitisation of delivery mechanisms in public programs is increasingly being used to improve targeted approaches, reduce out-of-system

Themrise Khan, Kanakulya Dickson and Maika Sondarjee introducing their new book Since the racial uprising following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the world has been faced with the reality of racism in most of what is known as the progressive, Western world. Movements like Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall have brought to the forefront the ingrained