By Murray Leibbrandt*, & Anda David*
World leaders have been asked to support a proposed International Panel on Inequality. Brazil, Norway, South Africa and Spain, together with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, made the call on the margins of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September 2026.
The panel would be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It would assess the scale of inequality, its drivers and consequences, and the policies that can reduce it. The African Union endorsed the initiative in February, and South Africa intends to present a General Assembly resolution to establish it.
This is a significant step. Inequality could, for the first time, have a permanent scientific body within the multilateral system. But the usefulness of such a panel will depend on whose realities its assessments reflect.
Recent experience shows why this question matters. The Global Justice Report, released in June by the World Inequality Lab, puts forward ambitious proposals. But, as economists working on labour and informality recently argued, many of the proposals are based on how things work in high-income countries. They assume that certain kinds of employment relationships, labour protections and institutions exist.
For more than a decade the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research has produced country inequality diagnostics and analyses with African researchers and national statistical offices. Our work is summarised in our recent book on inequality in sub-Saharan Africa.
We think global initiatives are a great step forward. The problem is that frameworks built mainly on the data and institutions of the global north might not be accurate where inequality is most severe.
To address this problem, we have been closely involved in the development of the African Inequality Review. Its aim is to close the knowledge gap about inequality. It will start new cross-country research on African inequality and build a public resource linking the continent’s inequality datasets.
The review can offer three things:
- African-led assessments of inequality, grounded in the continent’s institutions and labour markets
- linked data infrastructure needed to study rents, assets and fiscal choices alongside household outcomes
- a model of research designed with policymakers rather than delivered to them.
Africa will shape the future of global inequality
According to UN projections, sub-Saharan Africa will account for more than half of world population growth through to the end of this century. Almost all the global growth of the economically active population will come from Africa.
Most Africans are concentrated at the bottom of the global income distribution, so this demographic shift pulls the world’s distribution with it. Between 1990 and 2016, the share of the world’s poorest income decile living in sub-Saharan Africa rose from about one in five to one in three, according to African Development Bank and World Bank estimates.
Inequality within African countries is also among the highest in the world. The continent has seven of the world’s ten most unequal countries. In 2019, the richest 10% of Africans received about 54% of total income, and the poorest half received 9%.
The prospects of Africa’s young and growing population will therefore determine where global inequality goes. An international panel without a strong African evidence base would be assessing the past of global inequality rather than its future.
That evidence base remains thin. The picture of African inequality is based on fewer country observations than other regions. And different databases present markedly different pictures of the levels and changes in inequality on the continent.
Inputs on inequality
The African Inequality Review is modelled on two previous reviews:
- the Deaton Review in the UK, a multi-year, multidisciplinary assessment of inequalities in income, wealth, health and opportunity led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies chaired by Nobel laureate Angus Deaton
- the Latin American and Caribbean Inequality Review, a scholarly effort to explain why inequality in the region is still so high and what can be done about it.
The launch was held immediately after a meeting of the African Union and South Africa African Expert Panel. Having the panel involved ensured that senior African policymakers took part along with African and international practitioners and researchers. Participants were asked two questions.
- Where are important policy choices being made without the evidence decision-makers need?
- Which inequality questions, answered well, would change policy?
Several priorities emerged.
The first was that many of the most pressing evidence gaps lie where fiscal, corporate and asset data meet. Participants pointed to tax breaks that governments grant to individual large firms case by case, through negotiated agreements rather than through rules in tax law that apply to every firm. These incentives are rarely tied to results that can be checked, such as jobs created, purchases from local suppliers, or skills and technology passed on to local workers.
They also pointed to difficulties in assessing full economic and social returns to investments in public infrastructure. Impact studies routinely examine who is displaced by a new road and who gains market access. They far less often examine the impacts across the procurement chain and throughout time. In other words who wins contracts and subcontracts and who ultimately captures the rents.
Control over land, mineral resources and credit, and access to legal identity through civil registration, were raised in the same vein.
These patterns of control shape who gains access to opportunity and where productivity stays blocked. Assessments that ask whether a policy or an investment loosens those constraints, rather than only who gains and loses at the point of delivery, give a better account of its longer-term returns.
The second priority was that these questions build on household survey research rather than replace it. Decades of survey and panel data tell us who is poor, how people move in and out of poverty, and how disadvantage passes between generations. The frontier now is to link these microdata with tax records, administrative and firm-level data, and ownership and procurement registers. That would connect the distribution of outcomes to the mechanisms that produce them.
The third concerned the limits of single summary measures. A Gini coefficient, the single number ranging from 0 and 1 as inequality rises, summarises how unequally income is shared across a population. But it cannot tell a government whether its priority should be competition policy and progressive taxation, social protection, or early childhood investment.
Nor is there a known threshold where inequality becomes too high to sustain growth. This depends on what’s causing inequality in that context. For example, in many African contexts even low aggregate inequality masks strong gender biases.
The fourth was that policy design must start from the reality of informal livelihoods, rather than assume they can simply be regulated into formality.
Finally, participants stressed that researchers and policymakers need to work together from the outset if research is to inform decisions.
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* UCT Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Scholar; Director of ARUA’s African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research within SALDRU., University of Cape Town
* Senior researcher, Agence Française de Développement (AFD)
