The Sun Never Sets on Colonial Wealth.
Colonialism and the origins of today’s extreme wealth inequality I remember being in Kenya in 2020 and seeing the pictures of those protestors throwing the statue of the slaver into the sea and being so excited. I had been researching a piece on the Mau…
Sick Development Ep 2 – The Key Man
Transcripts Maaza 00:14 This is Sick Development, a podcast that shines a spotlight on the harms caused by rich country governments channeling billions in development funds to for profit health care in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I’m your host Maaza Seyoum and thank you…
How the United Nations and the World Bank can turbo charge the effort to reduce Inequality
It is difficult to reduce inequality by dwelling on the poorest without reducing the concentration at the top Over the past decade, many leading economists and global institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have taken…
The Uncounted Rich
A few years ago, Alex Cobham published a great book which was called ‘The Uncounted’ and had a powerful central argument- inequality is much worse than we think, because so much of it is uncounted. At the bottom, because our data on poverty comes from…
The miracle of equitable economic growth, and why we need it now more than ever.
My first proper job for Oxfam was wonderful. I had just returned from living in Malawi, and I got a job supporting Oxfam offices working on governance and public policies. As part of this job, I travelled for the first time to Vietnam, and I…
Land inequality, my friend Robin and Malawi
Mulanje mountain in the south of Malawi is a truly mystical place. It rises from the plain in very steep cliffs, to a mysterious plateau high in the clouds. Its near vertical walls of black rock have water pouring down them that glistens magically in…
Locusts, disasters and the other side of climate inequality.
Locusts, climate loss and inequality In the summer of 2020, when the world was reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, Kenya and other drought-stricken countries in East Africa were hit by a plague of locusts. It was a truly biblical moment. Millions of these voracious insects…
Are rich people psychopaths?
Some years back, I went to visit a friend of mine from college who was staying with a very rich author whilst completing an internship in London. He lived in a massive house in Battersea, a rich area next to the river Thames. Looking round…
AS HUNGER SURGES, HERE ARE THREE WAYS INDIA CAN TACKLE ITS MASSIVE INEQUALITY
In our latest blog for Davos 2023, Amitabh Behar introduces the India supplement to Oxfam’s Davos report, which reveals how just 5% of Indians own more than 60% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half of the population have 3% In the past three years the…
WELCOME TO THE ERA OF ‘GREEDFLATION’
Corporations that dominate food and fuel markets have been using the war and pandemic as a smokescreen to bump up their prices much more than their costs. Oxfam’s Alex Maitland explains how increased corporate profits have driven at least half of inflation. Open an economics…