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SECTION 1 2 3
TIME TO ACT
Today’s extremes of inequality are bad for everyone. For the poorest people in
society though – whether living in sub-Saharan Africa or the richest country in
the world – the chance to emerge from extreme poverty and live a dignified life
is fundamentally blocked by extreme inequality.
Oxfam is calling for concerted action to build a fairer economic and political
system. A system that values the many by changing the rules and systems
created by the few that have led to today’s crisis of inequality; a system which
levels the playing field through policies that redistribute money and power.
As outlined in Section 2, there are many concrete steps that governments and
institutions can take to start closing the gap between the haves and havenots.
This is not an exhaustive agenda, but, if committed to, these steps could
start to reduce economic inequality.
Governments, institutions, multinational corporations (MNCs) and civil society
organizations must come together to support the following changes, before we
are tipped irrevocably into a world that caters only to the privileged few, and
consigns millions of people to extreme poverty.
1) MAKE GOVERNMENTS WORK FOR CITIZENS
AND TACKLE EXTREME INEQUALITY
Working in the public interest and tackling extreme inequality should be
the guiding principle behind all global agreements and national policies
and strategies. Effective and inclusive governance is crucial to ensuring
that governments and institutions represent citizens rather than organized
business interests. This means curbing the easy access that corporate
power, commercial interests and wealthy individuals have to political
decision making processes.
Governments and international institutions should agree to:
• A standalone post-2015 development goal to eradicate extreme economic
inequality by 2030 that commits to reducing income inequality in all
countries, such that the post-tax income of the top 10 percent is no more
than the post-transfer income of the bottom 40 percent.
• Assess the impact of policy interventions on inequality:
• Governments should establish national public commissions on
inequality to make annual assessments of policy choices – regulation,
tax and public spending, and privatization – and their impact on
improving the income, wealth and freedoms of the bottom 40 percent;
• Institutions should include measures of economic inequality in all policy
assessments, such as the IMF in their article IV consultations;
• Publish pre- and post-tax Gini data (on income, wealth and consumption)
and income, wealth and consumption data for all deciles and each of the
top 10 percentiles, so that citizens and governments can identify where
economic inequality is unacceptably high and take action to correct it;
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