A proposed International Panel on Inequality would assess the scale of inequality, its drivers and consequences, and policies that can reduce it, modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Brazil, Norway, South Africa and Spain, together with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, called for support for the initiative on the margins of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September 2026.
The African Union endorsed it in February, and South Africa intends to present a General Assembly resolution to establish it.
Writing in The Conversation, economists Murray Leibbrandt and Anda David argue that the panel’s usefulness will depend on whose realities its assessments reflect.
They point to the Global Justice Report, released in June by the World Inequality Lab, whose proposals they say are based on how things work in high-income countries and assume that certain kinds of employment relationships, labour protections and institutions exist.
The authors are involved in the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research, which has produced country inequality diagnostics with African researchers and national statistical offices, and in the development of the African Inequality Review.
Africa will shape the future of global inequality
The demographic stakes are central to their argument. According to UN projections cited in the piece, sub-Saharan Africa will account for more than half of world population growth through to the end of this century.
Between 1990 and 2016, the share of the world’s poorest income decile living in sub-Saharan Africa rose from about one in five to one in three, according to African Development Bank and World Bank estimates.
The continent has seven of the world’s ten most unequal countries, and in 2019 the richest 10% of Africans received about 54% of total income while the poorest half received 9%.
The authors describe the African evidence base as thin, based on fewer country observations than other regions, with different databases presenting markedly different pictures of inequality levels and changes on the continent.
The African Inequality Review, they write, is modelled on the Deaton Review in the UK and the Latin American and Caribbean Inequality Review, and aims to start new cross-country research and build a public resource linking the continent’s inequality datasets.
Inputs on inequality
At the review’s launch, held immediately after a meeting of the African Union and South Africa African Expert Panel, participants were asked where important policy choices are being made without the evidence decision-makers need, and which inequality questions, answered well, would change policy.
Leibbrandt and David report that several priorities emerged.
The first concerned evidence gaps where fiscal, corporate and asset data meet.
Participants pointed to tax breaks governments grant to individual large firms case by case through negotiated agreements rather than through rules in tax law that apply to every firm, and noted these incentives are rarely tied to checkable results such as jobs created, purchases from local suppliers, or skills and technology passed on to local workers.
They also pointed to difficulties in assessing full economic and social returns to public infrastructure investments, observing that impact studies routinely examine who is displaced by a new road and who gains market access but far less often examine impacts across the procurement chain and throughout time.
Control over land, mineral resources and credit, and access to legal identity through civil registration, were raised in the same vein.
The second priority was that these questions build on household survey research rather than replace it.
The authors write that decades of survey and panel data tell us who is poor, how people move in and out of poverty, and how disadvantage passes between generations, and that the frontier now is to link these microdata with tax records, administrative and firm-level data, and ownership and procurement registers.
The third concerned the limits of single summary measures.
A Gini coefficient, the single number ranging from 0 to 1 as inequality rises, summarises how unequally income is shared across a population, but the authors argue it cannot tell a government whether its priority should be competition policy and progressive taxation, social protection, or early childhood investment.
They add that there is no known threshold where inequality becomes too high to sustain growth, since this depends on what is causing inequality in that context, and that in many African contexts even low aggregate inequality masks strong gender biases.
The fourth priority was that policy design must start from the reality of informal livelihoods rather than assume they can simply be regulated into formality.
Finally, participants stressed that researchers and policymakers need to work together from the outset if research is to inform decisions.
Leibbrandt and David conclude that an international panel without a strong African evidence base would be assessing the past of global inequality rather than its future.
Leibbrandt receives funding from the National Research Foundation, the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, the Agence Française de Développement and the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics, and is affiliated with the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research.
David has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation
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