UNITED NATIONS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and its partners on Tuesday called for urgent action to save Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10: Reduced Inequality.
"COVID-19 caused the largest rise in income inequality in three decades, as poorer countries lacked financing to support the incomes of the poor or to confront the COVID-19 and AIDS pandemics," said a press release issued by the Centre for International Cooperation at the University of New York, Development Finance International, Oxfam and UNAIDS.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and global inflation crisis, inequality of income, wealth and health outcomes rose sharply. Without seriously tackling inequality, we will not end AIDS by 2030 (SDG 3.3), and the SDGs on poverty, gender and education will be strongly compromised, the release said.
In his Sustainable Development Report 2023, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that SDG 10 is one of the worst performing SDGs, and action has never been more urgent on this goal.
For SDG 10 to be successful in reducing inequality, it is vital that the international community takes concerted action during the current review of the SDGs which will culminate at the UN General Assembly SDG summit taking place on Sept. 18-19, 2023, the release said.
"Action includes better monitoring the inequality of income and wealth within and between countries. This requires using indicators which are used by all member states and institutions including the UN or the World Bank, these indicators are called the Gini coefficient and the Palma ratio," said the release.
The official start to the call to action would take place during the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development on Tuesday at the UN headquarters in New York.
President of Namibia, Hage Gottfried Geingob, and President of Sierra Leone, Julius Maada Bio, have expressed their support and willingness to co-sponsor this call to action to Save SDG 10 and fight inequality.
In addition, more than 230 leading global economists, political leaders and inequality experts, including former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, French economist Thomas Piketty, Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh, former prime minister of New Zealand Helen Clark and Colombian writer and economist Jose-Antonio Ocampo, have sent an open letter to the UN secretary-general and the president of the World Bank, urging them to include the incomes and wealth of the rich in monitoring inequality by using Gini and Palma, and to ensure trends in inequality are monitored annually in all countries.
"This will allow the world to see the true picture of growing extreme inequality, and to strengthen its efforts to promote anti-inequality policies," said the release. ■
