The income of the world’s poor is going up, but they’re $1 trillion poorer. What’s going on?

April 28, 2016
Oxfam number cruncher Deborah Hardoon tries to get her head round something weird – according to the stats, the poorest half of the people are getting poorer even though their incomes are rising. It has become something of a tradition that in January every year we take a look at the Forbes list of billionaires and the Credit Suisse Global
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Civil society must change itself before it can change the world

April 26, 2016
  Danny Sriskandarajah, Secretary General of the Civicus global civil society network, has some heretical thoughts about CSOs putting their own house in order This week, more than 900 activists from more than 100 countries are meeting in Bogotá, Colombia for International Civil Society Week. We will come together at what feels like a momentous and difficult time for civil
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Book Review: Branko Milanovic’s brilliant take on Global Inequality

April 15, 2016
Some of my favourite development economists are nomads, people with feet in different regions, which seems to make them better able to identify interesting patterns and similarities/differences between countries. Ha-Joon Chang (Korea/UK), Dani Rodrik (Turkey/US) and now Branko Milanovic (Serbia/US), whose latest book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization is a brilliant and thought-provoking essay stuffed
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Tackling Inequality is a game changer for business and private sector development (which is why most of them are ignoring it)

March 31, 2016
Oxfam’s private sector adviser Erinch Sahan is thinking through the implications of inequality for the businesses he interacts with Mention inequality to a business audience and one of two things happens. They recoil in discomfort, or reinterpret the term – as social sustainability or doing more business with people living in poverty. Same goes for the private sector development professionals
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Why we need to rethink how we measure inequality – please welcome the Absolute Palma index

March 11, 2016
Oxfam’s Nick Galasso (left) and ODI’s Chris Hoy (right), author of a new paper on the topic, argue for a rethink on inequality metrics The world is abuzz about inequality Pope Francis famously tweeted that inequality is the root of evil. As we witnessed in Davos in January, the media can’t get enough of Oxfam’s statistic that the richest 85, 80, 62
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From Sweatshops to Switzerland, the women in Myanmar behind the billionaires’ fortunes

March 4, 2016
Max Lawson, Oxfam’s Head of Global Campaigns reflects on a recent visit The young garment factory workers share a tiny room in a wooden shack, spotlessly clean, with pictures of Myanmar pop stars beside a photo of their parents back in the village. But there is no escaping the smell of the open drain outside. The three sisters and their
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Why being scooped by Piketty is no bad thing for Oxfam (but what will the government of India think?)

November 13, 2015
Guest post from Tim Gore, Oxfam’s climate change policy czar  No-one likes to be scooped, least of all researchers who have battled through Oxfam’s internal sign-off process. But when the authors who beat you to the publication punch include one of the most famous economists in the world – as we experienced last week – we can at least be
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Great new IMF paper puts women’s rights at the heart of tackling income inequality

November 10, 2015
The IMF continues to surprise an old lag like me who cut his policy teeth condemning it as the incarnation of extreme market idolatry and anti-poor structural adjustment programmes in the 80s and 90s. Read its new ‘staff discussion note’, Catalyst for Change: Empowering Women and Tackling Income Inequality to see why. The authors point out that ‘Income inequality and
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Can we afford the super rich?

October 22, 2015
Max Lawson, Oxfam’s Head of Global Campaigns and Public Policy, unpacks the political implications of the recent Credit Suisse report on global wealth. At the beginning of this year the Economist, a right leaning newspaper, criticised Oxfam for predicting that by 2016 the world’s wealthiest 1% would hold more net wealth than the other 99% put together, calling our projection
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Do we need to think in new ways about gender and inequality?

October 20, 2015
Following on from last week’s post by Naila Kabeer, Jessica Woodroffe, Director of the Gender and Development Network, argues for a change in the way we think about gender and inequality The recent launch of Oxfam’s Gender and Development Journal issue on Inequalities got me thinking about the much heralded ‘leave no one behind’ agenda in the new Sustainable Development Goals
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Links I Liked

October 19, 2015
Schrödinger’s Immigrant, via Ingrid Srinath Could the Jaded Aid satirical cardgame help reform the aid industry? Or is it just the perfect Xmas pressie for jaundiced aid workers? humanosphere.org/basics/2015/10 Poverty is falling faster among Africa’s rising number of female headed households (which are now up to 26% of the total), but we don’t really know why Good news on Malaria
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Why it’s time to put gender into the inequality discussion

October 15, 2015
LSE’s Naila Kabeer introduces a new issue of Gender and Development, which she co-edited The development industry has focused mainly on the question of absolute poverty over the past decades of neo-liberal reform.  Given the levels of deprivation that continue to exist in poorer regions of the world, this focus is not entirely misplaced. But it only tells us part
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