Coordinated by: Lucas Chancel, Ricardo Gómez-Carrera, Rowaida Moshrif, Thomas Piketty
Lead author: Ricardo Gómez-Carrera
The World Inequality Report 2026 (WIR 2026) marks the third edition in this flagship series, following the 2018 and 2022 editions. These reports draw from the work of over 200 scholars from all over the world, affiliated with the World Inequality Lab and contributing to the largest database on the historical evolution of global inequality. This collective endeavor represents a significant contribution to global discussions on inequality. The team has helped reshape how policymakers, scholars, and citizens understand the scale and causes of inequality, foregrounding the separatism of the global rich and the urgent need for top-end tax justice. Their findings have informed national and international debates on fiscal reform, wealth taxation, and redistribution in forums from national parliaments to the G20.
Building on that foundation, WIR 2026 expands the horizon. It explores new dimensions of inequality that define the 21st century: climate and wealth, gender disparities, unequal access to human capital, the asymmetries of the global financial system, and the territorial divides that are redrawing democratic politics. Together, these themes reveal that inequality today is not confined to income or wealth; it affects every domain of economic and social life.
The global inequality in access to human capital remains enormous today, likely a much wider gap than most people would imagine. Average education spending per child in Sub-Saharan Africa stood at around just €200 (purchasing power parity, PPP), compared with €7,400 in Europe and €9,000 in North America & Oceania: a gap of more than 1 to 40, i.e., approximately three times as much as the gap in per capita GDP. Such disparities shape life chances across generations, entrenching a geography of opportunity that exacerbates and perpetuates global wealth hierarchies.
The report also shows that contributions to climate change are far from evenly distributed. While public debate often focuses on emissions associated with consumption, new studies have revealed how capital ownership plays a critical role in the inequality of emissions. The global wealthiest 10% of individuals account for 77% of global emissions associated with private capital ownership1 , underscoring how the climate crisis is inseparable from the concentration of wealth. Addressing it requires a targeted realignment of the financial and investment structures that fuel both emissions and inequality.
Πηγή: World Inequality Lab