Search results

The International Monetary Fund’s advice to countries promotes policies that fail to reduce inequality and may even increase it, according to Oxfam research. This advice clashes with what their own research shows countries should do to reduce inequality.

Rich countries at the OECD ministerial meeting on development cooperation have failed to collectively commit to a massive scale-up in aid budgets to help developing countries face the devastating and widescale impact of COVID-19. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed and worsened the depth of inequality in West Africa. It has pushed millions into poverty. However, the pandemic offers West African governments a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest heavily in inequality-busting policies by boosting public spending, making tax systems more progressive, and tackling joblessness and precarious work.

G7 leaders in Taormina fail to tackle famine or the challenges of migration. President Trump, more than anyone else, blocked agreement on many of these key concerns that affect millions of the world’s poorest people. 

Every country in the world is experiencing an economic shock as a result of the Coronavirus crisis, and all governments must act now to protect their people from destitution. Unless dramatic action is taken to shore up the economies of developing countries, the crisis could push as many as half a billion people into poverty.

In response to reports of a potential compromise agreed by the EU, South Africa, India and the US for a waiver of intellectual property rules for COVID vaccines, Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy for Oxfam and co-chair of the People's Vaccine Alliance, said:   

Gender-based violence is a global pandemic existing in all social groups across the globe, yet it has largely been ignored in the COVID-19 response and recovery plans. Barriers to achieving gender justice continue to exist, but progress made since the start of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Campaign show that there are solutions.

Widening inequalities are tearing our world apart. This is not by chance, but choice: “economic violence” is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. But we can radically redesign our economies to be centered on equality, in which nobody lives in poverty, nor with unimaginable billionaire wealth—in which inequality no longer kills.

The G20 leading economies have sidelined development and food security at their summit in Los Cabos.

84 percent of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) COVID-19 loans encourage, and in some cases require, poor countries hard hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic to adopt more tough austerity measures in the aftermath of the health crisis, warned Oxfam today.