Inequality panel urged by 37 former world leaders

Thirty-seven former world leaders have urged current governments to support a new International Panel on Inequality to address extreme wealth disparities.

The signatories include former German chancellor Olaf Scholz, former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, former Malawi president Joyce Banda, former Portugal president Anibal Cavaco Silva and former Seychelles president James Michel. Former prime ministers Aminata Toure of Senegal, Helen Clark of New Zealand, Francisco Sagasti of Peru and Han Seung-soo of South Korea also signed.

In the open letter, the former leaders said inequality had reached record levels in many countries and required an urgent policy response. They said the bottom half of humanity had received one cent of every dollar of growth since 2000, while the richest one percent had received 41 cents.

The letter also said the world had seen its first trillionaire emerge this year while one in four people faced food insecurity. It said intensifying inequality erodes democratic freedoms and that studies show the most unequal countries are seven times more likely to experience democratic erosion than more equal countries.

The former leaders called on their successors to back the creation of the International Panel on Inequality and to join a high-level event on the issue on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The proposed body, modelled on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was recommended in a G20 report by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. The letter said the panel would track inequality trends, impacts and drivers, and assess evidence on policymaking.