TWN Info Service on UN Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Biodiversity/Traditional Knowledge
3 August 2026
Third World Network

The poverty of growth

Penang, 3 Aug (Lean Ka-Min) – Even as ever more goods and services are produced and total incomes rise, poverty stubbornly, scandalously persists. A recent report suggests that privation is rife not despite, but often because of, economic growth, and explores a pathway out of this predicament.

“The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth” was prepared by Olivier De Schutter during his tenure (April 2020–April 2026) as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. It draws on inputs sourced from more than 400 contributors, including from governments, trade unions, civil society groups, academics and UN agencies, over an 18-month consultative process. The report (which is available at https://www.neep-poverty.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/The-Roadmap-for-Eradicating-Poverty-Beyond-Growth.pdf) was presented to the UN Human Rights Council in June.

The Roadmap stresses the need to “escape the trap of growthism: the ideological belief that no progress is possible without first increasing the total output of the economy, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product [GDP] indicator”. Questioning the conventional wisdom that sustained growth is a precondition for poverty eradication, it laments that “economic growth has disappointed”.

Instead of steadily delivering new employment opportunities, growth has “translated only weakly into job creation” in many contexts, especially in low- and middle-income countries, says the report. For the rich countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) meanwhile, there is a mere 0.34 correlation between GDP increase and unemployment reduction. Indeed, as labour-saving technologies take hold and worker protections are dismantled, jobless growth risks becoming the norm, the report warns.

With the benefits of growth largely eluding the working class, it is the rich who hoover up the gains. According to the Roadmap, the top 1% of the population captured 36.7% of global wealth growth between 1995 and 2025, against just 1.1% for the bottom 50%. Expectations that such windfalls can help swell public coffers are dashed by the regressive nature of current tax systems at the top end and by the prevalence of tax dodging.

Moreover, growth may not only fail to snuff out poverty; it can even worsen the lot of the poor. The report points to the phenomenon of “uneconomic” growth, whose costs exceed its benefits. This can arise when the very policy tools deployed in the pursuit of growth end up negating any welfare gains generated, particularly in the case of lower-income segments. Prime culprits are neoliberal policies of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation which hurt workers, consumers and marginalised groups while boosting corporate bottomlines. Additionally, pressures to maximise productivity can exact a punishing toll on physical and mental health and social cohesion, which in turn further enmeshes people in poverty – the vicious cycle of what the report calls the “burnout economy”.

One of the most consequential costs of (un)economic growth is being borne by the earth itself. The Roadmap cites scientists’ warnings that “infinite economic growth is incompatible with a finite planet – one characterised by limited resources and a constrained capacity to absorb waste and pollution”. By fuelling climate change and biodiversity loss, the drive to produce more and consume more is pushing the earth’s life-support systems to breaking point. As the writer Benjamin Kunkel has remarked, “planetary capitalism is living beyond its means”.

Yet not everyone on the planet is guilty of profligacy. Instead, it is high-income nations which account for 74% of global excess material use, according to the report, led by the United States (27%) and the high-income countries of the European Union (25%). On an individual level, the wealthiest 10% of the global population are responsible for 47% of consumption-based carbon emissions and 77% of emissions linked to private capital ownership. At the very top, the richest 1% account for 41% of ownership emissions, nearly double the share of the bottom 90 percent.

While the poor bear little responsibility for environmental ruin, they are the ones hardest-hit by its impacts. Over 90% of reported deaths caused by climate and other weather-related disasters between 1970 and 2021 occurred in developing countries. Further, people living in poverty, explains the report, often depend directly on ecosystems for their livelihoods, are more likely to reside in climate-exposed areas and have limited capacity to deal with shocks linked to environmental degradation, such as rising food prices, declining labour productivity and declining health conditions.

If the drive for growth is wrecking the earth, then the solution for some is to decouple economic expansion from environmental pressure. Advocates of “green growth” contend that the hunger for growth can be satiated while staying within ecological limits, thanks to technological innovation, renewable energy and efficiency gains. However, the report finds no empirical evidence of such decoupling on the scale required, with the authors of one cited study maintaining that “in the absence of robust evidence, the goal of decoupling rests partly on faith”. “Continuing to premise economic development strategies on the eventual realisation of green growth,” the report cautions, “amounts to a high-risk wager, one that the world’s poorest populations cannot afford to lose.”

“Green” or otherwise, growth has not delivered in terms of poverty eradication. More growth will only result in the expansion of an economic system that produces deprivation and want in tandem with its output of goods and services. As the Roadmap says, poverty is “not an accident” but is “manufactured” – generated through structures of resource production and distribution and through relations of power. The need therefore is to “chang[e] the architecture of the economy itself” to “break the cycles that perpetuate poverty while at the same time respecting planetary boundaries by reducing dependency on economic growth”.

Towards this end, a myriad of “post-growth” models have emerged over the past 50 years, notes the report, ranging from degrowth, doughnut economics and steady-state economics to the Ubuntu economy and buen vivir – all of which share a commitment to distributive justice and environmental sustainability while rejecting GDP growth as the primary economic goal. In addition, international institutions, including within the UN system, have explored alternatives to growth-centred policy paradigms.

In order to be translated from paper to practice, these initiatives, the Roadmap suggests, should be anchored to a “human rights economy” framework. Launched by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2023, the concept of a human rights economy aims, among others, to “move beyond growth as the organising principle of economic policy” and to “redress root causes and structural barriers to equality, justice and sustainability by prioritising investment in economic, social and cultural rights”. As a unifying framework for action, it will enable governments to be held to account for upholding universal human rights obligations under international law.

With indefinite global growth not looking like a viable option to realise these obligations, a just distribution of existing resources is imperative. Accordingly, the report proposes a mix of redistributive and predistributive policies, the latter seeking to prevent inequalities from arising in the first place rather than redressing them after the fact. Nestled within the human rights economy framework, the wide-ranging policy recommendations put forward in the actual “roadmap” section of the report encompass “(1) post-market compensation through progressive taxation and universal public services, combined with (2) in-market inclusion strategies such as labour market reforms that guarantee living wages and reduce precarity, and (3) sustained pre-market social investment in early childhood, education, housing, and nutrition to break the vicious cycles that perpetuate poverty across generations”.

Thus, for example, the report calls for fiscal systems that are both fair in their distributive logic and effective in raising revenue, decrying current fiscal regimes where “those with the greatest capacity to contribute pay proportionally the least, while the burden of financing public services falls disproportionately on labour and consumption”.  One objective it sets for fiscal policy is to limit high concentrations of wealth, which can undermine democracy and introduce macroeconomic distortions linked to rentier dynamics, asset price inflation and market concentration. The super-rich continue to accumulate – just 12 of the richest billionaires have amassed more wealth than the over 4 billion people in the poorer half of humanity – while typically enjoying a lower effective tax rate than ordinary workers. To remedy this perverse state of affairs, the Roadmap proposes a recurrent net wealth tax, taxes or caps on inheritances, and maximum income/wage schemes as means of reducing inequality, rebalancing economic and political power, and sourcing funds for poverty alleviation.

Corporations are not let off the hook either, given that corporate tax dodging is estimated to have caused $1.7 trillion in global revenue losses in 2016–21 alone. Ensuring that businesses contribute their fair share would require, according to the report, a global minimum effective corporate tax (one that goes beyond an existing OECD scheme with its attendant limitations), taxes on excess or windfall profits, and – to redress developing countries’ current inability to tax the gains of Big Tech companies operating without a physical presence – digital services taxes.

Environmental levies are also on the agenda, with the Roadmap proposing taxation of resource use, ecological degradation and luxury consumption in order to curb overexploitation and mobilise funding for environmental remediation. By targeting those most responsible for environmental harm and reducing pollution that disproportionately impacts those least responsible, such taxes help advance the cause of environmental justice.

Revenues generated from progressive taxation can in turn be directed towards the supply of universal basic services, which the report sees not as market commodities but as public services provided as entitlements organised around need. “A human rights economy,” says the report, “rests on the foundational premise that education, healthcare, food, water, sanitation, housing, energy, transportation, and social protection are life-saving necessities, essential for a dignified life, and thus cannot be made conditional on an individual’s ability to pay.”

While progressive taxation and universal basic services constitute a redistributive approach to combating poverty, the predistributive element of the Roadmap is reflected in its policy proposals regarding the labour market. These proposals aim to strengthen the position of labour, whose share of income has fallen in most countries over the last 40 years as productivity gains are captured by higher profits. The measures recommended include an employment guarantee through public job programmes; promoting transition from informal to formal work; greater protections for platform workers; and working time reduction without a corresponding cut in pay (currently over a third of the world’s workers work more than 48 hours a week). The report makes the case for establishing fair and living wages necessary to secure a decent standard of living for workers and their families. As of April 2026, it notes, only 28 out of 186 countries had a statutory minimum wage above the lowest living wage threshold applicable in their national context.

Beyond these, the report seeks to chart out a path towards strengthening workers’ collective voice. It emphasises that freedom of association and collective bargaining are not only fundamental labour rights but also enabling rights which allow for the realisation of other rights at work. The report calls for democratising the workplace, noting that decision-making power within a firm “is generally concentrated in the hands of shareholders and top executives, while workers – who generate value and bear the risks of restructuring, relocation, or automation – have little influence over strategic choices”. A rebalancing would entail, among other steps proposed, mandatory minimum thresholds for worker shareholding and representation on corporate boards.

The Roadmap is far-reaching in scope: apart from the above, the proposals it advances also span the areas of monetary, industrial, financial, environmental, social and other policies. At the same time, it recognises that their successful implementation will hinge not only on what happens within national borders. For instance, an effective global minimum corporate tax calls for international tax cooperation, while indebted governments need sovereign debt relief to free up resources for public services and investment. Thus, the report sets out recommendations for action on the international front too, including a sovereign debt cancellation framework, a dedicated global fund to finance social protection, expanded allocations of IMF-managed Special Drawing Rights, a UN Framework Convention on Tax Cooperation, and an end to unilateral economic sanctions.

Underlying the Roadmap’s proposals for international collaboration is the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”. This principle acknowledges that “[h]igh-income countries, having contributed most to ecological overshoot and accumulated wealth through unequal global arrangements, bear heightened responsibilities to reduce excessive consumption, mobilize resources and support policy space in low- and middle-income countries”. “International solidarity,” the report asserts, “is not charity; it is a legal and moral obligation grounded in shared humanity and differentiated capabilities.”

But while the rich nations will have to stop consuming as if there is no tomorrow (lest there really be no tomorrow), growth may still be a necessity for developing countries whose populations’ gaping needs cannot be met without raising economic output. However, such growth must be inclusive and not of the “uneconomic” kind; it should no longer be tied to demand from the Global North but be oriented towards satisfying domestic need, suggests the report.

As shown by the interdependence of actions at domestic and international levels, the policy proposals put forward in the report are not a smorgasbord to pick and choose from, but form a cohesive blueprint of mutually supportive measures. Yet, “[w]ell-intentioned policy alone is both naïve and insufficient”, the Roadmap warns, for policy must also reckon with politics. Economies have been politically constructed to serve the interests of powerful groups, with any reforms limited to technocratic tinkering while the core, unequal structures are left intact.

Such constructions are not things of fixity and permanence, however. The economy can be rebuilt to reflect the priorities of the majority over the elites. Reclaiming democratic control over the organisation of production, distribution and investment would open the door for pursuit of poverty eradication unbound by growth dictates. Recognising that “the economy is a site of democratic struggle”, the Roadmap underlines the need to build the power of public institutions, social movements and participatory processes. Towards this end, it advocates safeguards against corporate capture of state institutions by erecting firewalls between corporate actors and public decision-makers, mandating disclosure of lobbying activities, and closing off the “revolving door” between public service and big business. Moreover, collective decision-making in steering the economic course can be enhanced with the involvement of trade unions, social movements and community organisations, and through inclusive mechanisms like citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting and social audits.

Amid the prevailing gloom, the report maintains belief in “a politics of possibility”, and the roadmap it lays out points the way to a world free of poverty and of a ruinous addiction to growth. The fate of humankind may come to rest on whether it can reach this destination.