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

Toolkit: State and City Taxes on Extreme CEO-worker Pay Gaps

Recent Posts Related to CEO Pay

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

How An International Grassroots Campaign Beat Metal Mining Corporations

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

“And Still I Rise”

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

Republican Tax Plan Giveaways to Wall Street (co-published with Americans for Tax Fairness and the Take On Wall Street campaign

Recent Posts Related to Global Finance

Low-Wage Workers

Featured Report

Report: The Human Trafficking of Domestic Workers in the United States

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

vice president kamala harris speaking to a crowd

In Guatemala, Harris Should Address U.S. Policies That Put Corporations Over People

Jen Moore, Ellen Moore | June 7, 2021

As the Vice President seeks to remedy root causes of migration, she should vow to dismantle neoliberal rules that have been devastating for rural and Indigenous peoples.

How CEOs Pumped Up Their Pandemic Paychecks

Sarah Anderson | May 26, 2021

While low-wage employees lost hours, jobs, and lives, their CEOs got raises. It's time to tax huge CEO-worker pay gaps.

rev. william barber at the third reconstruction event of the poor people's campaign - joined by members of congress

Poor People’s Campaign and House Progressives Call for a ‘Third Reconstruction’

Sarah Anderson | May 21, 2021

A new Congressional resolution lays out a comprehensive vision for eradicating poverty and tackling racial and economic inequality.

While Professing BLM Support, Wall Street Banks Reject Racial Equity Audits

Sarah Anderson | May 17, 2021

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is urging shareholders to vote against a proposed review of the impact of bank policies and practices on racial inequality.

Medics arrive to take blood samples of residents of Spanish Garden residential complex after a COVID-19 positive case was detected in an apartment, in Guwahati.

Corporations Should Not Have the Power to Undermine the Global Battle Against COVID-19

Manuel Perez-Rocha | May 14, 2021

Even if governments agree to suspend patent protections for vaccines, corporations can fight back with expensive lawsuits.

ceo pay versus median worker pay 2021 executive excess

How Corporations Pumped Up CEO Pay While Their Low-Wage Workers Suffered in the Pandemic

Sarah Anderson | May 11, 2021

More than half of the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers rigged pay rules in 2020 to give CEOs 29 percent average raises while their frontline employees made 2 percent less.