As many as 45 African countries have been further squeezed to their bones as funding shrinks to lowest ever levels, and as a portion of the so-called aid goes back to the pockets of rich donor countries.
"For every $1 the IMF encouraged a set of poor countries to spend on public goods, it has told them to cut four times more through austerity measures," says Oxfam.
There is a practical, possible alternative to the enduring injustice of global inequality: an intergovernmental tax body under the auspices of the United Nations, writes Alex Cobham.
The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today.
Unless austerity is reversed, people in developing countries will lose social protections and public services just when they are most needed. And it doesn't have to be this way, write Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins for Project Syndicate.
Pandemics, wars and recessions do not exempt states from human-rights commitments. They must tax multinationals and the richest more to protect the most vulnerable, writes Magdalena Sepúlveda for Social Europe.
The external debt of the world’s low and middle-income countries at the end of 2021 totalled 9 trillion US dollars, more than double the amount a decade ago. Such debt is expected to increase by an additional 1.1 trillion US dollars in 2023.
