The Guardian summarizes the main points of the agreement reached in Glasgow by the delegates

Beyond the health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected economies and people’s
livelihoods around the world. Experts forecast an additional 250 million people in extreme poverty by
20301, while the consequences of the pandemic are resulting in a 10th of the global population suffering
from hunger, amounting to 720 to 811 million people worldwide.

Many political leaders and decision makers now realize that well-designed social protection systems have a transformative effect on people living in poverty.

Read the Policy Brief of the Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors

Despite urgent climate and development needs, geopolitics and deference to private finance rule the day

Read the analysis of Bretton Woods Project

Poverty and inequality are critically linked. Poverty occurs when sections of society have insufficient resources to be able to afford a minimal acceptable contemporary living standard. Its scale is ultimately determined by, as the key architect of post-war prosperity, John Maynard Keynes, put it, on how the ‘cake is cut’. History cannot be clearer: high levels of poverty and inequality have gone hand in hand. It is no coincidence that over the last four decades, poverty levels have more than doubled, while the share of national income accruing to the top one per cent has surged.

Read the article by Stewart Lansley

The world is estimated to lose around USD 500-600 billion in revenues from corporate tax avoidance each year. Ensuring that governments can collect this revenue through ending global tax avoidance will play a major role in ending extreme poverty. Overseas aid provided to developing countries focused on eliminating extreme poverty must therefore incorporate addressing tax avoidance, especially by Multinational Enterprises, as a core component of their efforts.

To access the article directly, go to this webpage

Author: Abdul Muheet Chowdary is a Senior Programme Officer with the South Centre Tax Initiative of the South Centre.

In September this year, the United Nations will host a Global Food Systems Summit in New York. The organisers of this summit are pitching it as a crucial debate of the decade which is to define the future of agriculture. They aim to bring together various stakeholders across sectors who play a role in the global food system.

Yet, the organised peasant and indigenous movements from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas that collectively represent most of the world’s small-scale food producers have called for a total boycott of this summit. In April this year, scores of scientists, researchers, faculty members, and educators who work in agriculture and food systems, also issued an open call to boycott the event.

Read the article by Elisabeth Mpofu

We had a very interesting discussion on Francine’s and Meena’s new book at AEPF13:

You can find the book here: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789813365704

And the discussion here: coming

A year ago, the Institute for Policy Studies published “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth  Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes and Pandemic Profiteers,”  and began tracking billionaire wealth gains as unemployment surged.  We teamed up with Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) to track the wealth growth of America’s billionaires over the last year.  This report summarizes the extraordinary growth in wealth of those now 657 billionaires based on real-time data from Forbes on March 18, 2021.

Here are highlights from the last 12 months of billionaire wealth growth:

Read the article