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

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

Sarah Anderson, Bella DeVaan, Scott Klinger | May 18, 2023

Some executives can expect to receive monthly retirement checks larger than their workers’ median annual pay.

Jerry Mander, Paradigm Warrior

John Cavanagh, Maude Barlow | April 19, 2023

One of the great intellectual and strategic leaders of the global economic justice movement, Jerry Mander, died this week. His charge to us: don’t give up because you lost the first round. Educate movements and the public to fight back.

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

| March 29, 2023

From the US and Canada, we defend El Salvador’s historic mining ban and call for the immediate release of jailed Santa Marta 5 Water Defenders!

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

Lindsay Koshgarian | March 13, 2023

Twenty years ago this month, the U.S. government took a sharp turn toward surveillance, racial profiling, and an immigration policy based on fear. In March 2003, the newly christened Department of […]

Colombian President Gustavo Petro (second from left) celebrates the re-opening of the Colombia-Venezuela border with Venezuelan officials

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

| March 7, 2023

"Es urgente la necesidad de impedir que la búsqueda de justicia ante abusos de multinacionales, daños y pasivos socioambientales, laborales, financiación del paramilitarismo, amenazas o asesinato de líderes sindicales se vea saboteada por este sistema.”

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

| March 7, 2023

The groups urge the Colombian government to withdraw from treaties that enable transnational corporations to sue the country in tribunals designed to favor their interests.

One of the many protests in Honduras during the pandemic by the Comité Municipal en Defensa de los Bienes Comunes y Públicos, calling for the release of eight water defenders standing up for the Guapinol and San Pedro rivers. (Photo: Guapinol Resiste)

Open Letter: Protect Honduras’s Endangered Environmental Activists

IPS Staff | January 20, 2023

IPS joins an international coalition condemning the assassination of environmental leaders in Honduras.

people holding signs that say make billionaires pay

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

Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo | January 17, 2023

An annual wealth tax on the world’s richest could raise $1.7 trillion globally.

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

Chuck Collins | January 16, 2023

The more we learn from courageous whistleblowers like Marlena Sonn, the more outrage and pressure will build to reform trust law and eliminate the games that the Waltons and the Gettys are playing.

A woman places an "I voted" sticker on her shirt.

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

Sarah Anderson | November 10, 2022

Citizen-led initiatives scored big wins in the midterms. But now this form of direct democracy is under attack.

A photo of three different people speaking with microphones with a MeansTV chyron in front that reads "Major Marijuana Measures."

Rebekah Entralgo Fernandez on MeansTV on Ballot Initiatives on Election Night

Rebekah Entralgo | November 8, 2022

Rebekah Entralgo Fernandez speaks with MeansTV about key ballot initiatives during election night coverage.

A smiling Black father and daughter put change into a piggy bank.

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

Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins | October 25, 2022

Yahoo Finance quoted Sarah Anderson on CEO pay and Chuck Collins on billionaire wealth and cited IPS findings as part of examining income inequality.

Photo of women representing Movimiento por Nuestros Desaparecidos en México at 46thLetelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards.

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

Manuel Perez-Rocha | October 24, 2022

"The Movement for Our Disappeared Ones in Mexico emerged out of the need to pass laws regarding forced disappearances to ensure the government recognizes that the victims are not a number but rather, persons with names and faces."

Photo of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, a light skinned Hispanic man with grey hair and a black jacket and red tie, speaking with a raised hand in front of the UN flag, EU flag, and several other flags.

A Voice at the United Nations the World Needs to Hear

Sam Pizzigati | September 22, 2022

The UN’s secretary-general is speaking truth – about inequality — to our world’s leaders.

A landscape devastated by coal mines in La Guajira, Colombia (Shutterstock)

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

Jennifer Moore | September 13, 2022

With our allies, we've prepared a legal brief to support the Wayúu people’s rights to water, health, and food sovereignty in Colombia.

Barbara Ehrenreich at the 2008 Letelier-Moffitt Awards

Remembering Barbara Ehrenreich

Tope Folarin, John Cavanagh | September 2, 2022

The acclaimed author and activist had a 40-year history with the Institute for Policy Studies, first as a staff member and later as a project leader and board member.

Photo of Rep. Jamie Raskin (white man in black suit and red tie) standing next to iron monument of General Sheridan on a horse, speaking at a memorial event in 2019 with an embassy in the background.

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

Sarah Anderson | August 31, 2022

The Maryland Democrat draws from his constitutional scholarship in analyzing the proposal that will be on the September 4 ballot in Chile.

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

Sarah Anderson, Brian Wakamo | August 25, 2022

Black students have had to take out larger loans and faced greater difficulty paying them back than other borrowers.

The Huge Pay Gaps at Low-Wage Federal Contractors

Sarah Anderson, Brian Wakamo | August 17, 2022

New federal contracting standards could incentivize corporations to narrow the economic divides that undermine employee morale and business effectiveness.

Congress Takes Historic Step to Tax Stock Buybacks

Natalia Renta | August 10, 2022

This provision of the Inflation Reduction Act will discourage corporations from siphoning resources from worker wages and productive investments for share repurchases that inflate CEO pay.