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Friday, October 2, 2026 at 4:21 PM EDT
Although the temper tantrums of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu dominated mass media coverage of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, which opened in September 2026, the event also included the announcement of a far more significant matter: a campaign to address the problem of worldwide economic inequality.
On September 24, standing in for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Ronald Lamola, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, told General Assembly delegates that “the promise of democracy and international cooperation wanes when we cannot demonstrate that they can address inequality and insecurity.” Thus, “together with Brazil, Norway, and Spain, South Africa calls on this Assembly to throw its weight behind the establishment” of an International Panel on Inequality (IPI). Based on the model of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPI would research inequality within and between countries and develop policies to close the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
That gap is enormous. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and other specialists have recently reported, “the richest 10 percent of adults globally receives more than half (53 percent) of the world’s income, whereas the poorest half receives 8 percent.” When it comes to wealth, that “is even more concentrated, with the richest 10 percent owning around three-quarters of global wealth while the poorest half owns just 2 percent.” And “almost two-thirds of people live in countries where inequality is rising.” In turn, this economic inequality leads to “unequal access to education, health care, housing and finance,” factors shaping “the opportunities that direct people’s lives.”
The speech at the General Assembly, as well as the specialists’ report, originated with developments within the G20, an international forum of nations with advanced and emerging economies seeking to coordinate global economic policy. In 2025, when the South African government held the presidency of the G20, it commissioned a study of global inequality by independent experts and chaired by Stiglitz. Appearing last November, the study maintained that “inequality is one of the most urgent concerns in the world today,” and that “combating it is necessary and possible.” Indeed, according to the study, the inequality emergency was on a par with the climate emergency, and an IPI, once established, would gather information on the problem and propose solutions to it.
Recently, the campaign for a global response to global economic inequality has picked up momentum. By mid-September 2026, when the UN General Assembly session was underway, more than 1,500 economists and academics from more than 100 countries had signed an open letter backing the creation of an International Panel on Inequality. Among the high-profile signatories were former U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu, and numerous other prominent economists, including Thomas Piketty, Mariana Mazzucao, and Jayati Ghosh. In the letter, they maintained that “extreme concentrations of income and wealth translate into undemocratic concentrations of power, unravelling trust in our societies and polarizing our politics.”
