Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, called for reordering the global economy away from serving the consumption demands of the ultra-rich and toward meeting basic needs within planetary boundaries.
He said an emerging set of UN-linked initiatives could break longstanding institutional taboos about questioning growth, including a planned “roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth,” a UN secretary general initiative to replace GDP as the key success metric, and a G20 inequality panel report led by Joseph Stiglitz.
The practical consequence is a push to expand governments’ and multilateral institutions’ policy menu toward redistributive tools—such as wealth taxation, debt cancellation, job guarantees, and universal basic income—alongside a proposal for a permanent UN body to oversee inequality reduction.