Global Economy
The Global Economy Program provides research, communications, and networking support to dynamic economic justice movements in the United States and around the world. Our goal is to speed the transition to an equitable and sustainable economy while reversing today’s extreme levels of economic and racial inequality and excessive corporate and Wall Street power. The program focuses its work on six inter-related areas:
Inequality and CEO Pay
The program collaborates with a broader IPS team to produce Inequality.org and a related weekly newsletter that highlights the latest data and the sharpest strategies to reverse extreme inequality in the United States and around the world. The program is also a leading resource on one key driver of inequality — runaway CEO pay. For more than two decades, our annual report series “Executive Excess” has drawn extensive media coverage to the issue of CEO pay and practical solutions. A newer report series, “A Tale of Two Retirements,” is the first to track the staggering gap in retirement benefits between wealthy CEOs and ordinary Americans.
Featured Resource
Recent Posts Related to CEO Pay
- Clobbering a Shill for Overpaid CEOs
- CEO Pay Tax Break in GOP Health Bill
- Return of the Railroad Robber Baron
- A State Treasurer Defends CEO Pay Law
- Standing Up for ‘Bullied’ CEOs
- 5 Ways to End CEO Pay Subsidies
- How the Racial Wealth Gap is Spelled Out Through Retirement Savings
- The failure of Bill Clinton’s CEO pay reform – Politico
- This City Just Came Up With a Novel Way to Fight Inequality: Taxing Corporations With Extreme Pay Gaps
Trade, Investment, and Mining
The program works with grassroots activists around the world to advance alternative international trade and investment policies that elevate environmental, human, and labor rights above narrow corporate interests. In recent years program staff have played a lead role in supporting a successful campaign in El Salvador to defend against global mining corporations’ attempts to steamroll local resistance to harmful extractives projects.
Featured Article
Recent Posts Related to Trade, Investment, and Mining
Black Workers Initiative
The Black Worker Initiative aims to help expand opportunities for black worker organizing and thereby greatly contribute to the revitalization of the U.S. labor movement as a whole. This program is deeply committed to helping achieve both the historic and contemporary aims of the labor and civil rights movements.
Featured Report
Recent Posts Related to Black Worker Initiative
Wall Street and Global Finance
IPS staff play lead roles in coalitions working to restore the financial sector to its proper purpose of serving the real economy. We track the reckless Wall Street bonus culture, for example through our annual “Off the Deep End” report on the size of the financial industry bonus pool versus the cost of paying restaurant servers and domestic workers a living wage. We also advance innovative reforms such as a small tax on Wall Street speculation to curb short-term trading and generate massive revenue for urgent public needs, such as fixing our crumbling national infrastructure.
Featured Report
Recent Posts Related to Global Finance
Low-Wage Workers
IPS staff play lead roles in coalitions working to restore the financial sector to its proper purpose of serving the real economy. We track the reckless Wall Street bonus culture, for example through our annual “Off the Deep End” report on the size of the financial industry bonus pool versus the cost of paying restaurant servers and domestic workers a living wage. We also advance innovative reforms such as a small tax on Wall Street speculation to curb short-term trading and generate massive revenue for urgent public needs, such as fixing our crumbling national infrastructure.
Featured Report
Recent Posts Related to Low-Wage Workers
Inequality.org
Inequality.org and a related weekly newsletter are key resources for the public at large, journalists, teachers, students, academics, activists, and others seeking information and analysis on wealth and income inequality. Here, we collect the latest developments on inequality and keep readers abreast of relevant information concerning the widening wealth gap. We highlight stories from activists on the front lines of the fight against extreme inequality and share information that can be used for ongoing campaigns.
Latest Work

Report Reveals Top CEOs Dodge Taxes on Nearly $9 Billion in Retirement Funds

Jerry Mander, Paradigm Warrior

Statement from International Allies against Mining in El Salvador on Mar. 29 Protest at Salvadoran Embassies in US and Canada

After 20 Years, the Department of Homeland Security Is a Money-Guzzling Failure

Más de 220 organizaciones piden a Gustavo Petro y Francia Márquez revisar los tratados de inversión internacional que permiten millonarias demandas contra el Estado colombiano

Over 220 organizations call on Colombian government of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez to withdraw from international investment treaties that enable million-dollar corporate claims

Open Letter: Protect Honduras’s Endangered Environmental Activists

Report: “Extreme Wealth: The growing number of people with extreme wealth and what an annual wealth tax could raise”

Dynasty-Building Trusts: How the Getty and Walton Families Use Trusts To Dodge Taxes

This Year, Voters Made an End Run Around Out of Touch Politicians

Rebekah Entralgo Fernandez on MeansTV on Ballot Initiatives on Election Night

What's driving the gap between the richest and poorest Americans

Award Bestowed on the Movimiento por Nuestros Desaparecidos en México (Movement for Our Disappeared Ones in Mexico)

A Voice at the United Nations the World Needs to Hear

IPS Brief: Mining Companies Use Trade Agreements to Attack Indigenous Rights in Colombia and Beyond

Remembering Barbara Ehrenreich

Rep. Jamie Raskin on Chile’s Proposed New, More Equitable and Democratic Constitution

Biden’s Debt Cancellation Plan Is a Step Forward on the Racial Wealth Divide

The Huge Pay Gaps at Low-Wage Federal Contractors

Congress Takes Historic Step to Tax Stock Buybacks
View more >
Experts
Reports

REPORT: A Tale of Two Retirements 2023

Report: “Extreme Wealth: The growing number of people with extreme wealth and what an annual wealth tax could raise”

IPS Brief: Mining Companies Use Trade Agreements to Attack Indigenous Rights in Colombia and Beyond

Executive Excess 2022

Executive Excess 2021

How U.S. Trade Policy Failed Workers — And How to Fix It

Mining Injustice Through International Arbitration

Black Immigrant Domestic Workers in the Time of COVID-19

Report: CEO-Worker Pay Ratios in the Banking Industry

Report: Corporate Tax Cuts Boost CEO Pay, Not Jobs

Report: The CEO Pay Tax Break in the Republican Health Care Proposal

Report: The Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low Wage Workers

Report: A Tale of Two Retirements

Help Spread the Word: #CanURetire
