26.07.2017

Are the Multilateral Organizations Fighting Inequality? 2017 Financial Impact Report Executive Summary

International institutions are still not playing their key role in ensuring that we reverse the current disastrous trends in inequality, and allow all of the world’s citizens to benefit from future growth and development.

Photo: Isla Mujeres, Mexico – A Mexican man selling baskets stands on the beach near three young European women sunbathing on Isla Mujeres, an island in the Caribbean Sea near Cancun, Mexico.

When the world’s deepest pockets become deeper, and the world’s poorest become poorer, that is what we call growing global inequality. It is a phenomenon that takes us far back in human social and political history; and it is still enduring.

Raising awareness to this issue has increasingly been mainstreamed in discussions throughout the last decades and it now constitutes one of the top priority topics of the global international cooperation agenda. For example, during the elaboration of the Agenda2030, a global framework for development adopted by the United Nations, the fight against the increasing global inequality has been given a separate mandate, anchored in the Sustainable Development Goal 10. The objective of Goal 10 is to “reduce inequality within and among countries” worldwide, as determined by the United Nations (UN) who forged this goal.

How have multilateral organizations, alliances of states, performed so far in supporting governments across the world to fight inequality, including gender income inequality?

José Antonio Ocampo, Co-Director of the Central Bank of Colombia and Professor of Economics at Columbia University, together with a group of authors assesses the role of six international financial rule-making organizations in tackling the challenge of economic inequalities in this executive summary of the 2017 Financial Impact Report.

Published by New Rules for Global Finance, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and Development Finance International (DFI), the report reviews policies of the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Bank Group (WBG), Financial Stability Board (FSB), and Group of 20 (G20) and scores them on a scale of 1‐5 on their efforts and performance.

To understand more, have a look and download the executive summary here.

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