In an open letter published Monday and addressed to UN Secretary-General António Guterres and World Bank President Ajay Banga, the group called for more ambitious targets to reduce inequality and for better measurement of income and wealth disparities. “Extreme poverty and extreme wealth have risen sharply and simultaneously for the first time in 25 years… The richest 10% of the global population currently takes 52% of global income, whereas the poorest half of the population earns 8.
Reducing inequality by 2030 was one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals adopted by most governments in 2015. But five years later, global inequality — measured as the difference in average incomes between countries — saw the largest annual rise in three decades, driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the World Bank. Last October, the global lender also found that progress on reducing extreme poverty had come to a halt.