The first of four dialogues in the Wax and Gold Open Dialogue Series 2026 tracking the G20 Inequality Emergency Report and the emerging International Panel on Inequality, running through to the IPI’s public launch in September 2026. View the recording on our YouTube channel here.
The report at the centre of the dialogue is the G20 Global Inequality Report, the first of its kind commissioned by the G20 and published in November 2025 under South Africa’s Presidency. It was commissioned by President Cyril Ramaphosa and chaired by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, with a committee that included Jayati Ghosh, Imraan Valodia, Winnie Byanyima, Adriana Abdenur, and Wanga Zembe-Mkabile. Its central diagnosis, which names the moment the world finds itself in, is that we face an “inequality emergency” produced not by the natural workings of globalisation or technology but by specific, reversible policy choices. Financial deregulation, the weakening of labour protections, privatisation, and the cutting of corporate and top-income tax rates are named as the architecture that has generated it.
The scale the report documents is substantial. Since 2000, the richest 1% have captured 41% of all new wealth, while the bottom half of humanity gained 1%. In per-person terms, someone in the global top 1% became $1.3 million richer; someone in the poorest half gained $585. Income inequality is now high in 83% of countries, covering 90% of the world’s population. Wealth inequality far exceeds income inequality: billionaires’ assets together are worth roughly one-sixth of global GDP. 2.3 billion people are now moderately or severely food insecure, some 335 million more than in 2019. Alongside the economic findings the report traces a political one: highly unequal countries are approximately seven times more likely to experience democratic backsliding or authoritarian drift.
The report does not stop at diagnosis. It proposes the establishment of an International Panel on Inequality, modelled on the role the IPCC has played in reshaping climate politics: a permanent body to assess and monitor inequality globally, grounded in independent scientific and policy analysis, and oriented toward use by governments, movements, and publics. Political facilitation of the establishment process is being led by the governments of South Africa, Norway, and Spain, with a growing coalition of supporting states. The path to launch has moved through a Geneva meeting in March 2026, the Johannesburg convening of the founding committee in late April, and an OECD meeting in June, with the IPI’s public launch anticipated later in 2026.
This dialogue took place four days before the Johannesburg convening of the founding committee, offering both a substantive engagement with the report’s findings and a consultative space for the questions the establishment process is actively navigating: where such a body should be housed, whose expertise counts, and whether the gravitational pull toward established Global North institutions and ways of producing knowledge can be resisted.
Imraan Valodia and Jayati Ghosh set out the scale of the emergency, the structural drivers producing it, the political momentum now accumulating around the proposal for an International Panel on Inequality (IPI), and the real resistance the process will meet. The conversation moved quickly beyond presentation into substantive exchange on public procurement as a lever of wealth transfer, on whether poverty reduction and inequality can meaningfully be addressed as separate agendas, on the question of what kind of institution the IPI needs to be if it is not to reproduce the inequalities it seeks to address, and on the work required to move from analysis to political force.
The dialogue closed with a clear recognition that the Panel is one part of a larger struggle that will need researchers, organisers, worker movements, and publics organising together across many scales and sites. Several threads opened that the series will continue to work with in the dialogues ahead, particularly the question of where momentum gets built: not only at the macro level of international institutions or the micro level of individual conscience, but in the meso space where movements, networks, and worker organisations gather the force required to move systems.
Global inequality has declined modestly over the past 25 years, but this aggregate trend is almost entirely driven by rising incomes in China. Beneath the aggregate, three findings carried the weight of the presentation.
“This pattern of accumulation and distribution is not sustainable, and it is not economically sensible even within a liberal economics framework. This is not the sign of a healthy economy, nor is it in the interest of global economic wellbeing.” Imraan Valodia
Elaborated by Jayati Ghosh
The report identifies three groups of drivers. Pre-distributional frameworks, including intellectual property regimes, trade and investment agreements, and regulations that favour large capital and permit multinational expansion with inadequate regard for human rights and environmental limits. Rentier and financial drivers, including the expansion of finance capital operating largely beyond democratic accountability and often in directions that contradict stated climate goals. And labour market dynamics, including fragmentation and the failure of “good jobs” expansion even in high-growth economies such as India. Imraan also flagged AI, and in particular privately held AI, as a driver that will deepen these patterns further. These drivers compound: the political power that accrues to extreme wealth in turn shapes the regulations, tax systems, and policy frameworks that enable further accumulation.
Jayati also located the economic inequalities within the broader intersectional architecture of inequality: race, gender, caste, location, migrant status. Pre-existing forms of inequality interact with the economic ones to produce segmented labour markets and segmented access to credit and assets, reinforcing each other. Capitalism, she noted, uses the structures that are already there.
“We are probably witnessing the most extreme concentration of wealth and power in global human history. One person has the ability to buy up an entire public platform for conversation, the public square, and shift it into his own directions. That same person also owns more than half the satellites circling around the globe. This kind of power is globally unprecedented.” Jayati Ghosh
A recurring motif across both presentations and the discussion that followed was that all of this is the result of policy choices. The inequality emergency is not inherent to capitalism as a general system, but the product of a particular configuration of policies, regulations, and institutions that has intensified since roughly 1980. Capitalism has in the past been regulated in ways that reduced inequality substantially, as in Scandinavia and, more recently, in several Latin American countries. The drivers can be undone by shifting policies in the opposite direction.
“Poverty and inequality are not inevitable. They are human-made policy choices.”
Both speakers spent time on where the process now sits, because a substantial amount has shifted quickly. Approximately 700 economists, social scientists, and policy actors have endorsed the report and the proposal for an IPI. Political support has moved beyond a handful of champions: at a recent meeting of progressive leaders in Barcelona, 42 governments signed a declaration explicitly including support for an International Panel on Inequality and recognising the inequality emergency. The African Union, in a resolution led by South Africa in February 2026, endorsed the IPI proposal. Ramaphosa, Lula, the Prime Minister of Norway, and the President of Spain have been publicly supportive. The committee that produced the report has been expanded into a founding committee, supported by a Consultative Committee of inequality researchers. Two meetings of the founding committee have already taken place; the Johannesburg convening this coming weekend will work through the technical questions of what kind of institution the IPI becomes: whether purely academic or linked to the UN system, how policy impact is ensured, and how representativeness is built into the design.
The four work streams now envisaged for the IPI are data (including the reliability and comparability of the sources feeding the international system), drivers, consequences, and the policies required. Jayati was direct that data reliability is not only a matter of micro data in underserved countries, though that is critical. Many governments actively try to shape or withhold the survey data that goes into international systems. Building comparable, open, transparent measurement is therefore part of what the IPI will have to do.
“Just like the IPCC brought public attention to the climate emergency, created awareness, and made sure that people, societies, and governments everywhere were conscious of it and had to do something about it, we feel that an international panel on inequality will generate the kind of public attention needed to reverse these processes.” Imraan Valodia
Neither speaker minimised the resistance this work is meeting. Jayati was clear that the extremely wealthy do not acquiesce, and that governments that publicly support the Panel do not necessarily back equitable tax systems in the same moment. Global multilateralism is in a difficult period, with the United States’ current stance supported only by Argentina and Israel. But the point she wanted held was not the bleakness of it.
“We can stoop into depression, or we can say, no, this is the period when we can change things. This is a moment full of risks but also full of enormous potential, if there is sufficient energy to have that kind of push for change.” Jayati Ghosh
Laura Alfers (WIEGO) opened this thread, observing that inequality debates often target the wealthy without recognising informal workers as political subjects in that story, and proposing public procurement as one site where the poverty lens and the inequality lens have to meet. She pointed to the way the tech industry has used procurement in the United States, India, and elsewhere to reinforce market dominance, and asked directly how public systems are implicated in driving wealth inequality.
Imraan’s response picked up the thread and deepened it. Public wealth has remained static since 1980 while private wealth has grown roughly fivefold. Earlier periods of economic expansion saw much larger shares of output going into public spaces; what has changed in this era is where the benefits of humankind’s collective work end up. Procurement sits near the centre of that mechanism. Much of the work being transferred out of the public sphere is work that was once done in it, and it is leaving through contracting channels.
“We are transferring a huge amount of wealth, and public wealth from publicly held institutions to privately held institutions. The procurement system is a really key part of that process.” Imraan Valodia
Kameshnee Naidoo, in the chat, asked a companion question: how is the conversation on inequality being extended to include private capital as such? Federico Parra followed by arguing that the Panel will need to leverage both public procurement and inclusive industrial policies as design levers, and to surface the Social and Solidarity Economy forms already in practice as part of the policy architecture being proposed. Samantha Waki, also in the chat, posed the sharpest version of the diagnostic question the procurement thread opens:
“This is what really gets me, the transfer of the public wealth to make private wealth. At what point do we stop calling it capitalism and call it theft?” Laura Alfers and Samantha Waki, in the chat
Jayati pushed firmly against the tendency of international institutions, and the World Bank in particular, to treat poverty alleviation as a parallel track to addressing inequality. The two are, she argued, the same architecture viewed from opposite ends.
“These are strategies, policies, regulatory practices, institutions that operate to make certain people’s lives more fragile, more insecure, more materially almost impossible, and then make them much less resilient to facing shocks, which at the same time are enriching the people who are benefiting from not just all the policies, but also the shocks as well.” Jayati Ghosh
Marty Chen reinforced the point in the chat, arguing that policy and regulation as drivers need to be analysed not only for how they advantage the wealthy and powerful, but also for how they undermine the lives and livelihoods of the poor, as a single process.
Jayati was direct on the question of growth. The size of an economy is not the point. The purpose of an economy is to serve people and planet, and our measurement frames have to be rebuilt around that question. Stephen Marshall pressed the point from the floor, proposing that the focus shift from growth to satisfying need, with growth following where appropriate.
“GDP as an indicator sucks. We all know that. So let’s stop obsessing about it. Let’s instead think of the essence of what an economy should be providing us. The economy is subservient to people and planet, rather than people and planet serving the economy.” Jayati Ghosh
Samantha Waki, in the chat, offered the sharpest compression of this theme: growth can be code for extraction.
The International Panel on Inequality, modelled on the IPCC, is intended to produce robust, independent scientific and policy evidence that can move public understanding and governmental action. The founding committee has met twice, with a consultative group of researchers and policy actors, and will convene in Johannesburg in the days immediately following this dialogue to work through design questions.
Several participants pressed on the question of what makes this institution different from what has come before. Safia Khan called for an intergenerational, cross-sectoral, diverse panel with a campaign and advocacy arm alongside its policy focus, unlike the international governance bodies now visibly failing. Kameshnee Naidoo drew on her own experience of the Maya declaration on financial inclusion, cautioning that momentum is not enough, and urged attention to micro-data in countries with minimal statistical infrastructure, with investment in capacitating national statistics offices. Federico Parra urged the Panel to surface working alternatives already in practice, such as social and solidarity economy forms, rather than only tracking inequality.
“Knowledge production itself reproduces inequality. We could easily have ended up with an IPI based in a university in a country in the Global North, doing a large amount of analysis that does not translate into real-world action and is not representative of inequality experiences across the world. We are very committed to making sure that the IPI deals with inequality in all of its complexities, rather than making it a technical issue solved by a group of technical experts.” Imraan Valodia
Yvon Poirier (RIPESS) and Federico Parra brought forward a thread on what is already happening outside the dominant frame. Alternative economic forms, including community economic businesses, cooperatives, popular economies, and the broader social and solidarity economy, already exist in millions of community initiatives across the world. They represent around 10% of many national economies. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognising the social and solidarity economy for sustainable development in 2023. The motif Yvon offered, drawing on 25 years of movement work, was “resist and build.”
“Efforts must connect with the labour movement. Worker-led organising, especially in shrinking civic spaces, is still one of the few forces capable of pushing systemic change.” Sofia Trevino, in the chat
Samantha Waki offered a reflection that several participants picked up, and that opens a thread the series will continue to work with. The forward movement of inequality has its own accumulating momentum, she argued, built by specific actors with specific interests; what is required in response is not a single corrective but counter-momentum built at the level where such movement is actually generated. And she cautioned that the analytical habit of gathering everything under the umbrella of “capitalism” can flatten exactly the distinctions that would let counter-momentum be built.
“There is an onward forward movement that is gaining more and more momentum that is actively contributing to inequality. Is this defined beyond the usual economic terms? I feel like we have made capitalism a sort of umbrella term and boogeyman that has the danger of flattening this momentum that we are looking to create a counter-momentum against.” Samantha Waki, in the chat
Laura Alfers noted in reply that there are many capitalisms, and that where platform workers are organising at the International Labour Conference, pushback from Global North governments is visible and specific, not generic. Samantha returned later in the conversation to the point that what we need is attention at the meso level: the layer that sits between individual consciousness on one side and macro policy on the other, where movements, worker organisations, federations, and networks build the force required to move systems. Change at the macro level rarely happens on its own. Micro change is real but too small a lever by itself. The meso level is where momentum accumulates, and where much of the actual work of transformation sits.
Sofia Trevino, in the chat, pointed directly at this meso layer: efforts must connect with the labour movement, and worker-led organising, especially in shrinking civic spaces, is still one of the few forces capable of pushing systemic change. Federico Parra extended the point by urging the IPI to surface and amplify Social and Solidarity Economy forms already operating at local and national scale, and to create enabling policy and legal frameworks for them to grow. Yvon Poirier’s formulation from 25 years of movement work sat alongside these: resist and build.
This thread carries forward directly into next week’s dialogue on The Invisible Economy, where Laura returns alongside Laila Iskander and Naila Kabeer to take up the question of where recognition, organisation, and institutional redesign actually happen in the lives and networks of the 60% of the world’s workers whose labour the formal system was never built to see. If this dialogue mapped the macro emergency, next week turns to the meso: the layer where informal workers build their own visibility and where systems get moved.
Steven Klees asked the framing question of the second half: can the changes the Report envisions be made within capitalism, or does the logic of the system itself require going beyond it? He invoked Piketty on the long-term tendency of capital, and asked directly whether liberal capitalism is a contradiction in terms.
Jayati’s reply was disarming and clarifying. She has spent a large part of her career arguing against capitalism. But change, she said, does not come from one big shift. It comes from different things moving together, and the practical task is to bring in the changes, each perhaps seeming small, that cumulatively add up to the dignity of working life and people. Put those changes together and what they describe begins to resemble the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, she added, is what she personally would call socialism.
Imraan added two framing points. The first: the report emphasises that these patterns are the result of policy choices, and there is no inevitability to them; the big debate about capitalism and its alternatives can happen in parallel, but the policy choices can be addressed directly now. The second: even from inside a liberal economics framework, the patterns the report describes are not efficient. The standard efficiency-equity trade-off argument falls apart at these levels of concentration. The system is not just unjust; by its own internal criteria, it is not working.
“Broadly speaking, it doesn’t happen with just capitalism the way we understand it. But to begin to change it, we have to begin by controlling, reigning in the forces that are perpetuating it. We bring in changes that may seem small but cumulatively add up to the dignity of working life and people. Put them together and they end up sounding like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which frankly, to me, is socialism.” Jayati Ghosh
Seisei Tatebe-Goddu asked the sharpest operational question of the dialogue. What is required to make the jump from a report to a panel to policy shifts? Who do we need to influence, what kind of power do we need to build, and which institutions are the most strategic levers? Procurement and tax policy both surfaced as candidates. The underlying question, she suggested, is one of redistribution of power, and how we force that in the right direction.
Stephen Marshall pressed from a different angle, arguing that institutional system-building has repeatedly failed and that what is needed is a fundamentally different epistemology of what it means to be human, with people enabled to take care of their own lives. Imraan pushed back directly and carefully. The problem is not that the poor need to be left to take care of themselves; the problem is that the economy is stacked against them. The distributions of power in our economic system are fundamentally skewed to concentrated interests, and the real work is to change those distributions.
“The economy is stacked against those who we would think of as poor, who are struggling against all of these powerful interests to earn a livelihood enough to sustain themselves. It is a fundamental point about changing these distributions of power. We have made choices about how power is concentrated. It really doesn’t have to be that way.” Imraan Valodia
“The life that is going to come from this panel cannot come from the panel. It has to come from all of you and from people like you all over the world. The panel is just an instrument that you can use in that larger battle.” Jayati Ghosh
“There is no argument that will convince the 1% to change. No scientific report will convince them. Society needs to organise and decide to force changes.” Yvon Poirier (RIPESS), in the chat
Several questions were raised that the dialogue did not reach in the live discussion, most of them surfaced in the chat. They remain live threads for the dialogues to follow.
This dialogue is the first of four in the Wax and Gold series tracking the G20 Inequality Emergency Report and the emerging IPI through to its public launch in September 2026.
Next week’s dialogue, The Invisible Economy: Inequality, Informality, and Democratic Space, carries the conversation forward into the structural conditions that make much of the world’s work invisible, taking up directly several of the threads that opened here: the procurement question raised by Laura, the poverty-inequality architecture argued by Jayati, and the meso-level question raised by Samantha. Naila Kabeer, a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Rethinking GDP, joins Laura Alfers (WIEGO) and Laila Iskander, moderated by Jo Swinson of Partners for a New Economy.
Wednesday 30 April | 1pm UK | On Zoom.
UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights:
Broederlijk Delen, on the 25% revolution framing