POLICY BRIEFING JUNE 2023

The COVID19 pandemic, and the crisis related to the war in Ukraine, have brought even more extreme levels of inequality, with the richest continuing to get richer, and the bottom half of the world’s citizens suffering huge health and economic losses. [...] The paper also reiterates recent findings that for the first time since the global financial crisis, between- country inequality (and inequality between the world’s richest and poorest citizens) has risen sharply during COVID, due to the vastly different financial capacities of countries to respond to the pandemic with health and social protection programmes, and the inequity of global vaccine dis. [...] inequality, examines the impact of the indicator itself on progress, and makes suggestions for reforming the indicator so as to accelerate progress in reducing inequality in the second half of the SDG period. [...] Shared Prosperity The main indicator used to monitor progress in reducing inequality under SDG10 is indicator 10.1, under which countries have agreed to “By 2030, progressively achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40% of the population at a rate higher than the national average.” The World Bank is the “custodian” of this SDG indicator and is therefore responsible for compiling and verif. [...] One of the causes of this stagnation or backward movement in policy action is that the “shared prosperity” indicator is neither telling us the truth about the scale of the extreme inequality crisis, nor helping us to design and assess the impact of the policies which will bring its end.