Transitioning to Reduced Inequalities

The editorial sets out a diagnostic panorama on how and why inequality of income and wealth have increased in the last 50 years. Pointing out the problematic dynamic of societies drifting apart while environmental crises threaten our future, the authors offer a selection of work-in-progress think-pieces to stimulate research and open up pathways towards substantive reduction of multiple forms of inequalities and dignified lives for all within our planetary boundaries.

Social equality was one of three dimensions to be considered by the SDG High Level Panel of Eminent Persons. In keeping with the central importance of inequality, one of the 17 goals, SDG 10, is dedicated to reducing inequality. Yet, despite strong and well-documented links between inequality and environmental impacts, SDG 10 does not mention the environment, while more environmentally-focused goals address inequality indirectly, if at all. This raises the question of how a plan to achieve the SDGs taken as a whole should best think about relationships between inequality, environmental impacts, and access to environmental resources. In this chapter we address this question through the lens of three frameworks: climate equity, environmental justice, and analysis of distributional impacts. These frameworks urge a systemic view of inequalities and how they are reinforced and perpetuated. Absent a systems approach, acting on environmentally-focused goals can inadvertently exacerbate inequalities. This observation suggests the utility of an “SDG interactions” approach to sustainability policy. Interactions between SDG 10 and other goals can be either positive or negative, depending on how strategies are designed and implemented.

Climate change contains, in a nutshell, fundamental relations of social inequality such as gender, “race”, and class. This chapter outlines how climate change is human made, primarily by a capitalist economic system. Capitalism relies on exploitative relations of nature and humans, mainly in the global South and of women. A reduction of inequalities is possible through a socio-economic transformation, which seeks degrowth and an alternative to a Green New Deal.

This chapter considers the important relationship between capitalism, money and inequality in the world. Ultimately, it asks what policies can be pursued to reduce economic inequality both within and between states once we have a deep understanding of how the structural logic of capitalism, the creation of new money in the economy and the generation of inequality are all interrelated. The chapter argues that it is too often forgotten that while economic growth over the last three centuries has lifted many people out of extreme poverty, capitalism is primarily an economic, monetary and accounting system whose aim is to generate income and wealth inequality. This helps to explain why, even after centuries of global economic growth, the division of wealth both within and between nations has never been starker. Since the overthrow of capitalism is neither nigh nor perhaps welcome, the chapter investigates how the fiscal and monetary policy of states can be deployed to lessen harmful economic and financial inequalities and work towards achieving the 10th sustainable development goal.

Reducing inequalities both between and within countries is a major concern of policymakers. One aspect that is left out of many studies concerning sustainable development at the national level is the importance of globalization and participation in international trade. The following chapter sheds light on the differences regarding the integration of countries into the world trade network and the developments over the last five decades (1968–2016). To that end, we use a very rich dataset of bilateral trade from CHELEM-INT (CEPII) covering the trade flows between 72 countries between 1968 and 1990 and 84 countries between 1994 and 2016, detailed to a level of 147 products. Results show that trade inequality measured with the help of the Theil-Index decreased significantly over the investigation period. Whereas in the late 1960s, mostly highly developed countries were (almost) fully integrated in international trade, many Southern American, Asian and African countries significantly increased their participation over the course of time. However, even during the last decades of hyper-globalization, important differences between countries continued to persist. This is largely explained by their different specialization patterns emerging from unequal access to natural resources, technological innovation, and education.

International migration is identified in SDG 10 as a way to reduce global and within-country inequality. The literature on the effects of migration on migrants, their countries of origin, and their destination countries is vast. This review surveys recent literature on these topics, highlighting the complex relationships between inequality and international migration. The impact of international migration
on inequality depends on who the migrants are, where they come from, the circumstances surrounding their decisions to migrate, and their final destinations. Policies with respect to refugees and asylum seekers are different from those for other types of migrants, and not all policies work to reduce inequalities or benefit migrants and their countries of origin. Reducing or eliminating restrictions on the movements of human beings would bring very large economic benefits to the world as a whole, but the equitable distribution of these gains will require the development of appropriate policies.

As humanity becomes ever more urbanized, the urban environment is an ever more effective area in which to intervene in order to reduce inequalities. However, many of the urban policy interventions with the intended result of reducing inequalities are paradoxically perpetuating them. We discuss how this is the case in the context of US housing policy—particularly as it pertains to the role of underlying racial-ethnic and socio-spatial inequality in generating uneven housing outcomes—where the very policies claiming to be progressive expand existing group-based and place-based inequalities. We explore methods of overcoming this paradox by illustrating how heterodox economics and urban planning in practice could synergistically reinforce their respective disciplinary aspirations to speed up a transition to a more equitable world. In doing so, we highlight how calls for a Jobs Guarantee program, derived from heterodox economics, together with the support of locally based planning initiatives and a Homes Guarantee program, could bring us much further than we have come before toward reducing inequalities.

The evidence presented here is—to the contrary of arguments in recent literature on sanctuary cites—suggestive of an emancipatory potential of sanctuary practices in the urban environment, in spite of the fact that in many aspects of their lives the undocumented must remain in the shadows of the city. Sanctuary cities, it could be cautiously argued, thus have a potential to more robustly realize appropriations of urban space of a Lefebvrian “right to the city” and are suggestive of an alternative
legality grounded in ‘rightful presence.’ The New Sanctuary Coalition in New York actively dismantles the binary relations between ‘host’ and ‘guest,’ and disrupts the state monopoly on the legal and political through its accompaniment program and through a variety of sanctuary acts and practices.

This chapter provides an overview of inequality in Ghana from a political economy perspective. The extent and consequences of inequality in the country have fluctuated in response to structural factors linked to socio-economic and political changes. Critical historical junctures that have affected inequality trends in the country go back to precolonial times and include the social effects of slavery, the introduction of “legitimate commerce” following the abolition of the slave trade, the rise of the cocoa economy at the turn of the twentieth century, the adoption of socialist economic policies after independence, political instability between the late 1960s and early 1980s, and the advent of economic and political liberalisation from the mid-1980s. Against this backdrop, we interrogate how inequality in Ghana has evolved in response to these large-scale factors. The chapter is organised as follows: the first section provides a theoretical and historical overview of inequality. The second section explores the various domains of inequality in Ghana, with a focus on class, gender, and disability. This exploration is done against the backdrop of the country’s entrenched north–south disparities in development. The third section examines a selection of social development programmes introduced in recent decades and how the larger political context shaped their ability to produce propoor outcomes. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on progress made so far in actualising Ghana’s commitment to SDG 10.