President Cyril Ramaphosa. (GCIS)
President Cyril Ramaphosa has launched a G20 experts’ task team to advise global leaders on the effects of extreme wealth inequality and how to address it, as part of South Africa’s push to tackle the Global South inequality crisis.
Chaired by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts will deliver a report to the G20 — the first of its kind since the grouping’s inception.
“We are honoured to host a group of the world’s most respected economic experts, led by Professor Stiglitz, to produce a report that will be presented to G20 Leaders,” Ramaphosa said.
“People across the world know how extreme inequality undermines their dignity and chance for a better future. They saw the brutal unfairness of vaccine apartheid, where millions in the Global South were denied the vaccines to save them.”
Ramaphosa said the effect of rising food and energy prices, mounting debt and trade wars was widening inequality between the rich and the rest of the world, undermining progress and economic dynamism.
In March, Ramaphosa launched an Africa expert panel, chaired by former finance minister Trevor Manuel, to tackle the unprecedented debt crisis facing many African countries.
African states will pay close to $89 billion in external debt service in 2025, with 20 low-income countries at risk of debt distress, the presidency said.
More than half of Africa’s 1.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health, education and infrastructure combined.
The Africa expert panel will produce a “High-Level Report” with recommendations to ease Africa’s debt burden and reduce the cost of borrowing capital. The extraordinary committee will also advise G20 leaders on lowering extreme wealth and income inequality.
The committee was launched amid fears that global inequality is set to accelerate sharply as a result of global trade pattern disruptions, international financing, critical minerals flows and sovereign debt overhang.
Recent analysis shows the world’s richest 1% have increased their wealth by more than $33.9 trillion in real terms since 2015 — more than enough to end global poverty 22 times over, according to the presidency.
Skewed financing architecture, private investment and tax regimes are creating uncertainty for policymakers, consumers and firms, and are likely to deepen divisions.
Inequality on this scale poses a serious systemic risk to global economic, social and political progress, the presidency said.
The six independent experts are Stiglitz (United States), Adriana Abdenur (Brazil), Winnie Byanyima (Uganda), Jayati Ghosh (India), Imraan Valodia (South Africa) and Wanga Zembe-Mkabile (South Africa).
“Inequality has widened to extremes that threaten democracy itself and should be a concern of all of us; the profound rise in the discontents of mismanaged globalisation which in many places has contributed to this growth of inequality is also evident,” Stiglitz said in remarks carried in the presidency’s statement.
He said G20 nations had the power to choose a different path on a range of policies.
“The burgeoning body of scholarship on the causes of, and ways of reducing, inequality, can help us to redress the great divide that has grown enormously in recent years. Our task must now be to translate the evidence and public’s palpable anger at the great divide into sound, practical and transformative policy proposals for G20 leaders,” said Stiglitz.
Ghosh said policymakers the world over were asking for “evidence-based, practicable strategies to reduce inequality — and a new playbook to deal with the fractured and financialised 21st-century political economy”.
He said the world must move away from economic orthodoxies that produce “business-as-usual strategies” instead of confronting complex and inconvenient truths and that worsening inequality reflects long-term processes compounded by shocks ranging from the 2008 financial crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We now see a ‘perfect storm’ of shocks, from tariffs being weaponised to push for deregulation, to the slashing of life-saving aid, to uncertainty affecting private investment and employment — all in the context of worsening climate change,” Ghosh said.
Trade shocks and policy uncertainty further enriched the wealthiest while deepening poverty and insecurity among the majority. “This makes our work all the more urgent.”