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Given the immense financing needs to achieve development goals —nearly $4 trillion annually— Oxfam supports a robust and generous IDA replenishment. But reaching a record dollar amount only makes a bigger IDA, when what is most needed is a better IDA. A better, more impactful IDA must minimize the cost of finance, but more importantly catalyze investments that reduce inequality. After all, funds like IDA remain so crucial in part because we have collectively failed to address extreme inequality within and between countries.Rising inequality undermines actions on poverty, climate and economic transformation. It makes those efforts, including IDA investments, more costly and less effective. This year, donors and borrower governments have a critical responsibility to ensure the World Bank, through IDA21, facilitates investments that reduce inequality.This paper includes concrete recommendations pertinent to IDA21’s new Focus Areas and Lenses: Inequality Reduction, Progressive Domestic Resource Mobilization (DRM), Gender Equality, Education, Health, Social Protection, Climate and Private Sector Window (PSW). These recommendations build on successes and lessons from past IDAs, strengthen alignment with the World Bank’s new Corporate Scorecard and push for concrete and ambitious commitments to catalyze investments and cooperation that reduces inequality. They also reflect discussions with various IDA Deputies and advisors, World Bank staff, Executive Director offices, civil society and policy experts. 

The COVID-19 crisis cost women around the world at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020, equivalent to more than the combined GDP of 98 countries, said Oxfam today.  

Pressure is piling on the G20 to lead a global push to increase taxes on the richest citizens back to past levels that most people believe were fairer and more useful for society. 

EU governments are losing out on a staggering 286.5 billion euros in revenue annually, equivalent to 33 million euros per hour, due to their failure to fairly tax Europe’s wealthiest. This amount, equivalent to Finland’s GDP, represents what a European wealth tax of up to 5 percent could raise every year, according to Oxfam’s analysis. 

Runaway inequality has created a world where 62 people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population – a figure that has fallen from 388 just five years ago, according to an Oxfam report published today ahead of the annual gathering of the world’s financial and political elites in Davos.

 Commenting on the arrival of President Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos to promote his ‘…

At the close of the 2015 Spring meetings, Oxfam reacts to the summary of the event.

New Oxfam estimates show that 263 million more people could be pushed into extreme poverty in 2022, due to the combined impact of COVID-19, inequality and food and energy price inflation – accelerated by the war in Ukraine. Without urgent and bold national and international action, inequality and poverty will deepen, with poorer countries – many of which face looming debt crises – pushed deeper into poverty.

This report looks at Somali women’s experiences with conflict, peace, violence, insecurity and state rebuilding

Oxfam estimates that just one of the richest men in Ghana earns from his wealth more in a month than one of the poorest women could earn in 1,000 years. In this report, we call on the government of Ghana to use public spending to reduce inequality and put women’s economic empowerment at the heart of policymaking.