New Oxfam inequality report just dropped https://assets.oxfamamerica.org/media/documents/The-Inequality-Virus-English.pdf

As an avid (and sometimes critical) reader of these reports for a working paper on how IOs and NGOs frame global inequality, a couple of quick observations:

1a) Framing: As with previous reports (2017-2020), a woman of color (Adam, a young Malian activist) is the face of this report, in recognition of economic inequality's intersections with race and gender. Since 2019, Oxfam has identified the woman or women on the cover by name

1b) The report has forewards from the deputy president of a nurses union in South Africa, @DarrickHamilton, an expert in race and economic policy, and a Brazilian social worker, setting up the report's themes of race and health and their intersections with economic inequality.

2a) Headlines: The report notes that in 2020 inequality likely rose in every country, an observation likely to feature prominently in news coverage and a change from the usual eye-catching stat about X billionaires having the same amount of wealth as the bottom Y% of the world.

(Despite featuring prominently in the report Summary, it's worth noting that the claim that inequality rose in every country in 2020 is based on predictions from a survey of economists as current data is insufficient to support this claim definitively -- see pg. 29.)

2b) As with previous iterations of the annual Oxfam inequality report, this one emphasizes the gulf between a small number of the world's billionaires and everyone else, linking this to the impact of the pandemic in terms of the massive disparity in length of economic recovery

3a) Methodology/epistemic authority: central to this report's analysis is a survey of 295 economists about how they interpret covid's impact on inequality. Findings from this survey are juxtaposed w/ brief personal narratives and images like these:

3b) Academic theory, esp. as it relates to structural determinants of inequality, plays a more explicit role in this report than in previous ones, summarized in little explainer boxes like these and in greater detail in Section 2 of the report.

4a) Who is to blame? The report identifies how governments shape the distribution of harms from covid via public health and economic policy responses. Previous reports have exhorted readers to put pressure on gov'ts; this one locates agency more strongly with gov'ts themselves.

4b) Like previous reports, this one emphasizes the contingency of contemporary inequality & the political choices that have produced it, but also devotes considerable space to the structural forces of neoliberalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy in legitimating inequality

5a) National or global inequality? Oxfam's pretty unique among NGOs/IOs for treating inequality as a global rather than primarily national issue. This report identifies both national (esp. fiscal policy) and international (esp. sovereign debt) determinants of inequality.

5b) Moreover, the report devotes considerable space to how covid has exposed and reinforced inequalities of race, gender, sexual orientation, indigeneity, class, and citizenship within and across national boundaries.

6a) What is to be done? Despite the report's diagnosis of the multiple intersecting dimensions of inequality, its proposed solutions are located squarely at the national level, reinforcing the centrality of national governments as

6b) It suggests five steps: moving beyond GDP as the lodestar of economic policymaking; increased public investment in healthcare and social protection; strengthened labor rights and corporate regulations; higher corporate and wealth taxes; and rapid action on climate change.

In sum: This report should be commended for foregrounding of racial and health disparities, but I would have liked to see policy proposals that did more to acknowledge and respond to the inter/transnational drivers of income and wealth inequality, esp. immigration restrictions.