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thomas piketty
500+ Experts Worldwide Call for Global Panel to Address ‘Inequality Emergency’
"Clear and proven steps can be taken to reduce it and build more equal societies and economies," wrote economists and other experts, "which are the fundamental foundation stone of a successful future for us all."
Nov 14, 2025
Emphasizing that economic inequality is "a policy choice," more than 500 economists and other experts on the global wealth gap are endorsing a call made earlier this month in the first-ever G20 report on inequality: The "inequality emergency" must be confronted by new international body inspired by the United Nations' panel on climate change.
The creation of an International Panel on Inequality (IPI) was a central recommendation of the landmark report set to be presented next week at the G20 Leaders Summit in Johannesburg, and renowned economists including 2024 Nobel economics laureate Daron Acemoglum, Thomas Piketty, Isabella Weber, Ha-Joon Chang, and Jason Hickel were among those who signed a letter Thursday urging the creation of the committee.
The inclusion of economists, climate scientists, epidemiologists, historians, and experts from a range of other disciplines "reflects a key fact," said the signatories. "High levels of economic inequality have a negative impact on every aspect of human life and progress, including our economies, our democracies, and the very survival of the planet."
"Just as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has played a vital role in providing neutral, science-based, and objective assessments of climate change, a new International Panel on Inequality would do the same for the inequality emergency," reads the letter, which was also signed by global economic leaders including former US Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and former World Bank top economists and leaders.
Since its inception nearly four decades ago, the IPCC has provided governments with the most up-to-date scientific information about planetary heating and its impacts. Its assessments have informed the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which subjected wealthy countries to emissions targets for the first time; and the 2015 Paris Agreement, which has required countries to develop and implement plans to draw down planet-heating emissions.
An IPI, said the experts on Thursday, "would provide policymakers the best, most objective assessments on the scale of inequality, its causes and consequences, and consider potential solutions."
"We believe this is in the interests of policymakers from across the political spectrum, who see the importance of this issue and the need to base responses to it on data and evidence and sound analysis," reads the letter. "We know that scholars and experts across the world would readily contribute their time voluntarily—as thousands do for the IPCC—in support of such a necessary and vital international initiative. We are ready to assist in this process."
The letter followed the release of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Inequality's landmark report, which was presented to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier this month ahead of the G20 Leaders Summit.
The Extraordinary Committee, which is led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and also includes inequality experts such as Winnie Byanyima of Uganda and Jayati Ghosh of India, warned that in the last quarter-century, the wealthiest 1% of people around the globe have captured more than 40% of all new wealth—$1.3 million on average—while the bottom 50% has seen its wealth grow by just 1%, or about $585, in constant US dollars.
One in four people around the globe—roughly 2.3 billion people—face moderate or severe food insecurity, meaning they regularly skip meals. The report found that the problem is getting significantly worse, with the number of food-insecure people rising by 335 million since 2019.
The report found that 80% of all countries—accounting for roughly 90% of the global population—have high levels of income inequality, making them seven times more likely than more equal countries to experience democratic decline.
“We are at a dangerous moment in human history," said Piketty, co-director of the World Inequality Lab and World Inequality Database. "Rampant inequality is dividing nations and communities, threatening our social fabric, human rights, and the very essence of democracy. A global effort to tackle inequality is needed—and rigorous analysis of its causes, drivers, and solutions is the first step."
"Governments need to live up to the G20 Summit’s promise of ‘solidarity, equality, sustainability’ and urgently establish an International Panel on Inequality," he added.
Countries with low levels of inequality included Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland—places that also consistently rank high on global reports on happiness and that were found to have low levels of "health, social, and environmental problems," according to the report.
The countries with low levels of inequality have "generous universal transfers and social insurance, supplemented by targeted assistance," the report says.
“High inequality is the result of decades of a failed economics that has primarily benefited the richest in our societies," said Chang, research professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London. "Not only is there a lot of evidence showing that higher inequality produces more negative economic and social outcomes, there are quite a few examples of more egalitarian societies growing much faster than comparable but more unequal societies.”
The signatories of the letter emphasized that inequality "is not inevitable."
"Clear and proven steps can be taken to reduce it and build more equal societies and economies," they wrote, "which are the fundamental foundation stone of a successful future for us all."
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Leading Economists Endorse UN Expert's 'Economy of Genocide' Report After Trump Attack
A group of economists, including Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis, expressed solidarity with Francesca Albanese as the Trump administration pushes for her removal as U.N. special rapporteur on occupied Palestine.
Jul 08, 2025
A group of world-renowned economists has penned an open letter expressing support for United Nations expert Francesca Albanese's recent report scrutinizing the integral role that powerful corporations have played in sustaining Israel's genocidal assault on Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories.
The letter, first obtained and published in English by Zeteo on Monday, characterizes Albanese's report as "a major contribution to understanding the political economy of Israel's apartheid state, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and, now, their genocide," and argues her findings "must be studied and debated widely and freely."
The letter's signatories include former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, French economist Thomas Piketty, and University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor Jayati Ghosh.
The economists' endorsement of Albanese's report comes days after the Trump administration issued a statement calling on United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to remove her as special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories. The statement was released a day after the publication of Albanese's report, which the Trump administration characterizes as part of "an unacceptable campaign of political and economic warfare against the American and worldwide economy."
The top economists cited the Trump administration's statement as a key impetus behind their decision to publicly back Albanese's work.
"In view of the virulently hostile and indeed intimidating letter from the U.S. government to the U.N. secretary-general demanding the dismissal of Ms. Albanese and the quashing of her excellent report, we felt the need to express our strong support for Ms. Albanese and to encourage the U.N. to dismiss the shrill demands of the U.S. and Israeli governments," the economists wrote.
"Following a well-trodden path of genocide denial and of bullying anyone who challenges the right of the colonial power to dispossess Indigenous peoples," they continued, "the U.S. and Israeli governments, with most European governments too timid to take a stance, demand that the international community turn a blind eye to the ongoing genocide and, in particular, to the key role that multinational and national corporations are playing in maintaining the apartheid regime and enabling the subsequent genocide."
This is not business as usual.
My new UN report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, is out today.
It shows how corporations have fueled and legitimised the destruction of Palestine.
Genocide, it would seem, is profitable. This cannot continue, accountability must… pic.twitter.com/Ei3atw0TQ1
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) July 1, 2025
Albanese's report thoroughly documents corporate complicity and direct participation in Israel's assault on Palestinians, specifically naming dozens of corporations in a range of sectors—from Lockheed Martin to Microsoft to Chevron to Palantir.
"The complex web of corporate structures—and the often obscured links between parents and subsidiaries, franchises, joint ventures, licensees, etc.—implicates many more," Albanese wrote. "Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of the oPt creates an untenable situation for corporate entities to simply continue business as usual."
"The private sector must, in its own interests, urgently reconsider all engagement connected to Israel's economy of occupation and now genocide," she added.
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The World Bank Needs Better Metrics to Understand Inequality
The bank is pushing a statistical notion of “shared prosperity” that, as one expert puts it, “leaves the rich out of the equation!”
Aug 03, 2023
Been eating a bit too much ice cream this sweltering summer? Thinking about going on a bit of a diet? Well, imagine yourself counting calories but exempting anything with sugar from all your counting.
Would that approach help you make an appreciable dent on your excess bodily baggage? Of course not. We can’t eliminate what we ignore. And that goes for inequality as well, over 300 distinguished economists worldwide are charging in a new open letter to the United Nations and the World Bank.
Back in 2015, these eminent economists remind us, the world’s nations came together and adopted a series of “Sustainable Development Goals”—SDGs for short—designed to systematically attack both poverty and climate change. The tenth of these goals specifically aims to “reduce inequality within and among countries.”
Significantly narrowing our world’s deeply unequal distribution of income and wealth will, of course, always remain a tall order, given the political power that grand fortunes create. The World Bank, unfortunately, has made that order taller.
The progress so far on this inequality SDG? Practically nonexistent. By many measures, the open-letter economists note, our “inequalities have worsened,” and that worsening really matters. Without reducing the “deep divide” that separates our global rich from the rest of us, the economists suggest, we’ll forever be going nowhere on “ending poverty and preventing climate breakdown.”
Significantly narrowing our world’s deeply unequal distribution of income and wealth will, of course, always remain a tall order, given the political power that grand fortunes create. The World Bank, unfortunately, has made that order taller.
The U.N.’s member nations have essentially made the bank the world’s official inequality scorekeeper. But the metrics the World Bank uses to track inequality have turned out to be “very inadequate,” charges Jayati Ghosh, a coauthor of the economists’ new open letter.
We already have, Ghosh points out, a variety of established yardsticks for measuring inequality. The Gini coefficient plots actually existing income distributions between 0 for total equality and 1 for infinite inequality. The more easily understandable Palma ratio divides the income share of a society’s top 10% by the income share of its bottom 40%.
The World Bank isn’t relying on either of these standard measures. The bank is instead pushing a statistical notion of “shared prosperity” that, as Ghosh puts it, “leaves the rich out of the equation!” This World Bank measure defines success in the battle against inequality as what we have when the incomes of the bottom 40% are growing faster than the national average income.
On the World Bank’s scorecard, in other words, any nation where the incomes of the top 1% are rising ten times faster than the national average income would be making “progress” against inequality so long as the incomes of the bottom 40% were rising slightly faster than that national average.
This “bizarre notion of ‘shared prosperity,’” says Jayati Ghosh, “provides very misleading estimates of the extent of inequality or progress in reducing it.”
By this bizarre World Bank yardstick, over half the world—53% of the nations the bank sampled—were making progress against inequality just before the pandemic hit and another 11% were showing no change.
Researchers with the World Inequality Database, an ambitious statistical effort that takes inspiration from the ground-breaking research of scholars like Thomas Piketty, paint a starkly different picture. Only 26% of the world’s nations, as measured by the Gini coefficient, are actually showing progress against income inequality, and only 12% are showing progress in Palma-ratio terms.
For three top global inequality watchdogs—Oxfam, the Development Finance International, and the New York University Center for International Cooperation’s Pathfinders initiative—the World Bank’s “shared prosperity” scorekeeping makes plain the need for a real “data revolution” that spotlights the wealth of the world’s wealthiest.
The World Bank’s current approach, these three groups charged in a new report released last month, essentially “ignores what is happening to the rich.” We cannot afford that ignoring, the groups stress, not at a time when “the world’s wealthiest citizens continue to be largely responsible for extreme carbon emissions” while the world’s “poorest citizens pay the price through climate disasters.”
Will critiques like this get the World Bank to change its statistical ways? We’ll see. The bank’s first reaction to the economists’ open letter has been somewhat encouraging. The World Bank, says a spokesperson, agrees “we need to do more to address inequality” and “do better in measuring progress.”
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