Summary: The Global Justice Report

The Global Justice Report attempts to set out a new vision for global progress in the 21^st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability. It explores the conditions under which the world could move toward this horizon and traces an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100.

Its main conclusion is simple: it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but only if the transformation rests on three pillars simultaneously. Fast decarbonization of energy systems is necessary. But we also need a major shift toward sufficiency – understood as a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint and large changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use, and forest cover. In addition, neither decarbonization nor sufficiency can be financed and politically sustained without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them. The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.

The Global Justice Report is the first attempt to propose a fully quantified plan going in this direction, combining four dimensions that today's debates often treat separately: redistribution at the world scale, a deep reform of the international financial and economic order, a radical transformation of energy systems, and substantial shifts in consumption patterns. to most climate scenarios, including by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main novelty is we model all four dimensions together and place inequality and sufficiency at the center of the analysis.

Concretely: Per capita monthly national income converges to €5,000 in every country, closing a 16-fold gap. The share of the bottom half of global wealth increases from 2% to 30%, while the share of the billionaire class decreases from 6% to 0.05%. Nearly 90% of the world’s population double their income while working roughly half as many hours as they do today. Warming reaches 1.8°C by 2100, rather than over 4°C under baseline macroeconomic and policy trends.

The Global Justice Report is part of a broader international agenda for planetary habitability, social justice, and reform of the global financial architecture – including the Bridgetown Initiative launched by Barbados in 2022, combining international monetary reform, global wealth taxation, and climate finance; the recent Sevilla Commitment on development finance; the UN Tax Convention process; and G20 initiatives led by Brazil and South Africa on global inequality and the rebalancing of wealth and power within planetary limits. The main contribution of this report is to place these proposals within a quantified institutional framework, modelling socioeconomic convergence, temperature change, and distributional trajectories through 2100. Our broad conclusion is that it is possible to conceive of a quantitatively consistent plan for sustainable development on a global scale based on proposals such as the Bridgetown Initiative and other recent platforms.

Equality between countries: Average per capita monthly gross national income (PPP Euros 2025) rises to 5,000 Euros in all countries by 2100. Today, it ranges from 290 Euros in Sub-Saharan Africa to 4,590 Euros in North America/Oceania (a 16-fold gap).

Less work, more emancipation: Annual labour hours per employed person fall from about 2,100 hours today to about 1,000 hours by 2100, continuing the historical trend toward shorter working time.

Education and health for all: Per capita education spending rises to 8,400 Euros per year across all countries in 2100. Today, it ranges from 210 to 4,140 Euros. Health spending rises to 14,400 euros. Today it ranges from 110 Euros to 8,300 Euros. The share of global working hours devoted to education and health rises from 11% today to 43% in 2100.

Full gender equality: Women and men converge on equal amounts of economic and domestic labour and on equal average pay.

A world below 2 °C: Warming reaches 1.8°C under sustainable convergence and fast decarbonization, against over 4°C under persistent inequality and slow decarbonization (current policies).

Inequality compression: The income scale is compressed to 1 to 5, and the wealth scale to 1 to 10. This represents a major compression of global income inequality, on a scale similar to the reduction achieved in Western and Nordic Europe over the 20^th century.

Wealth redistribution: The bottom 50% global wealth share rises from 2% to 30% (×15), while the top 0.001% share (billionaire class) falls from 6% to 0.05 % (÷100) – a striking redistribution.

Global Justice Fund: Annual expenditures (including country dividends and investment flows) reach 10.3 % of world GDP per year on average over the 2026-2060 period. In comparison, current official development aid and the combined budgets of the UN, IMF, and World Bank account for less than 0.4% of world GDP. This is justified by the fact that new climate investments alone will represent 3-4% of world GDP per year in the coming decades and will need to be supplemented by a big push in education and health expenditures to foster global convergence.

World Sovereign Fund: An active portfolio of sustainable assets reaching 10% of the world capital stock (or equivalently, to 60% of the world GDP). Initial asset accumulation comes from reinvesting a large part of global wealth and income tax revenues over the 2026-2035 period. 

Global wealth & income taxes: A global wealth tax (rising from 0% at 10 times the world average wealth to 20% per year on billionaires) and a global income tax (rising to 90% at the very top), both targeting around 1% of the world population.

Large majority benefit in every region: About 89% of the world will double their monetary income between 2026 and 2100; over 95% gain in the global South, and between 85–95% in the global North. Over 99% of the population is better off when the valuation of leisure and planetary habitability is included.

From global plutocracy to global democracy: All inhabitants of the world have equal political voice in the Global Justice Fund and the new international order. Currently, Europe & North America/Oceania have 4x as many votes at the IMF and World Bank as their population share, while Sub-Saharan Africa and South & South-East Asia have 4x fewer votes than their population share.

End of exorbitant privileges: The creation of an International Clearing Union and a new international currency to put an end to exorbitant privileges, i.e. the fact that rich countries benefit from higher returns on their foreign assets than what they pay on their foreign debt, thereby receiving a financial transfer from poor countries (0.6-0.8% of world GDP per year on average over 2000-2025 period, about twice as much as total development aid).

The Global Justice Platform's basic objective for equality and prosperity is full income convergence across countries by 2100. Today, per capita monthly gross national income ranges from 290 Euros in Sub-Saharan Africa to 4,590 Euros in North America/Oceania (a 16-fold gap), with a world average of 1,410 Euros. By 2100, all countries will converge to 5,000 Euros per month (Figure 1). This corresponds to a target of 60,000 Euros per capita annually. Achieving this target implies annual GDP per capita growth rates of around 0-0.5% in today’s richest regions (North America/Oceania, Europe) and around 3-4% in today’s poorest regions (Sub-Saharan Africa, South and South-East Asia), the latter comparable to the average growth rate of East Asia across the last 75 years.

There are two main reasons for this target. First, all countries in the Global South aspire to economic prosperity, and any credible framework for global climate cooperation must account for that aspiration. At the same time, convergence to a higher level would not fit within a 2°C carbon budget. The 5,000 Euros target and the resulting growth cap in rich countries meet at the intersection of these two constraints.

Near-zero growth in today's richest countries does not mean that their living standards stagnate. From the perspective of monetary income alone, a large share of the population in rich countries would continue to see their incomes rise over the next decades, thanks to the sharp compression in wealth and income inequality within countries. Accounting for the value of additional leisure time and the avoided costs of climate damages relative to high-growth and high-warming scenarios, even today's richest countries will enjoy a substantial rise in comprehensive well-being indicators.

The first element of sufficiency in the Global Justice Platform is a large reduction in working hours: from about 2,100 hours to 1,000 hours per year per employed person, between 2025 and 2100 (Figure 2). As observed in historical episodes of working-time reduction, productivity growth makes such reductions possible.

Countries have historically used a significant share of their long-run productivity gains to enjoy more leisure rather than to consume more goods, and the mounting threats to planetary habitability now provide an additional rationale for limiting the economy's material footprint. The required pace is only slightly more ambitious than what occurred over 1860-1980, the peak of working-class mobilization on this issue. Of course, the fact that the projections are consistent with past experiences does not imply that they are easy to implement. The reduction in working hours relied on very strong collective mobilization and legislative action in the past, and the same will likely be needed in the future.

In addition to reducing working hours, all countries converge toward full gender equality in the labour market, with similar employment rates for women and men, equal hours of economic and domestic labour, and equal average pay (Figure 3). Gender equality is widely endorsed as an objective among younger generations across the world, much like working-time reduction and the preservation of planetary habitability, but achieving it also requires enormous political mobilization and far-reaching changes in institutions, public policies, and social norms. Equal parental leave, anti-discrimination rules, and gender quotas for promotion need to be systematized and reinforced; more radical tools, including fiscal equalization of incomes between women and men, are likely to be needed to rebalance power relations within households. The compression of the income and wealth scales presented later is also complementary to gender-equality objectives, given the pronounced over-representation of men at the top of these distributions.

The reduction in working hours also needs to be accompanied by a significant shift from material to immaterial sectors. The share of global working hours devoted to education and health rises from 11% in 2025 to 43% in 2100 (Figure 4). While this increase may appear large, it is worth noting that countries such as Norway and Sweden already allocate around 30–35% of labour hours to these sectors today. Given the scale of future needs in health and education, driven by population ageing and expanding access to higher education among younger generations, even the projected rise to 43% may well turn out to be insufficient.

The only way to keep warming below 2°C while achieving our objectives of equality and shared prosperity is to combine sufficiency and a fast energy transition (Figure 5). Sufficiency includes a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint, a large shift in consumption from material to immaterial sectors (education/health), and a substantial change in food habits, allowing for a strict deforestation ban and a gradual return of global forest cover to the 1900 level. The transformation of energy systems entails the electrification of energy demand, a shift to low-carbon fuels in sectors such as steel and cement, and the decarbonization of electricity generation. Only a rapid and urgent decarbonization can bring the share of fossil fuels to under 20% of global energy demand by 2050 and to zero before the end of the century, with electricity accounting for nearly 80% of total energy demand and generated entirely from low-carbon sources by mid-century. This requires massive investment in new infrastructure, around 3-4% of world GDP annually over the next three decades, primarily financed by the global rich, who benefited disproportionately from global economic growth in recent decades and bear a major responsibility for historical emissions.

Only through the combination of sufficiency and an energy transition can humanity stay below 2°C (Figure 6). Otherwise, the world is heading for a climate catastrophe, with global warming above 4°C by 2100. In particular, under current policies, fossil fuels still meet roughly half of global energy demand in 2100. Under current pledges, they still meet around 40%. We also find that targeted sufficiency can be more effective than aggregate degrowth. For instance, a 60,000 Euros per capita GDP target with a large consumption shift to immaterial sectors, change in food habits, and implied reforestation leads to a temperature rise of 1.8°C in 2100, i.e. less than the 1.9°C associated with large uniform degrowth (15,000 Euros for all in 2100) but without sufficiency and structural transformation (Figure 7).

The Global Justice Fund (GJF) is the centerpiece of the Global Justice Platform and the key institution responsible for addressing these challenges. It is designed as a new international institution dedicated to global socioeconomic convergence and financing sustainable development and the energy transition on a global scale. Its key objective is to ensure equitable development opportunities for all countries while limiting global warming to below 2°C.

The GJF is responsible for raising adequate revenues (via global wealth and income taxation), managing a World Sovereign Fund (made up of previously accumulated tax revenues) and distributing country dividends (allocated to each country on an equal per-capita basis and used to finance climate investment, education, and health expenditures) (Figure 8). The global wealth and income taxes come in addition to national tax systems and target only the very top of the world distribution, around 1% of the world's population.

In the early years of the platform, the global wealth tax does most of the work, drawing substantial payments from the world's billionaires, centimillionaires, and decamillionaires and channeling them into the World Sovereign Fund. The Fund accumulates assets equivalent to about 60% of world GDP, or about 10% of the world capital stock, and stabilizes around that level (Figure 9). Once it is built up, the income from those assets gradually replaces tax revenue as the platform's main source of financing: by 2050, investment income already represents three-quarters of GJF resources; by 2100, it represents all of them.

On the expense side, country dividends are distributed on an equal per-capita basis and therefore represent a smaller share of GDP in rich countries than in poor ones, on average about 2-3% of GDP in Europe and North America/Oceania over 2026–2100, against 5% in South & South-East Asia and 9% in Sub-Saharan Africa. They come with strong conditionalities: climate targets (low-carbon energy investment, verifiable greenhouse-gas emissions, end of deforestation), human capital targets (education and health expenditure), and inequality targets (distribution of income and wealth). Beyond financing country dividends, the World Sovereign Fund also serves a second key purpose: a permanent public stake of about 10% of the world capital stock, contributing to the reorientation of world investment toward sustainable development.

Annual expenditures of the Global Justice Fund average 10.3% of world GDP per year over the 2026-2060 period. This vastly exceeds the total combined resources currently allocated to development aid and international organizations (less than 0.4% of world GDP) (Figure 10). This is because the scale of the challenge is unprecedented: climate investment alone amounts to 3-4% of world GDP per year in the coming decades, and the GJF also needs to help finance human capital expenditure to foster global sustainable convergence (Figure 11).

A central objective of the Global Justice Platform is equal access to high-quality education and health for all. Total education and health spending rises from 13% of world GDP today, with very large disparities across regions, to about 38% of world GDP everywhere by 2100. The Global Justice Fund finances the early push: between 2026 and 2050, it helps poor countries close the most extreme gaps in education and health spending. Per capita education expenditure today ranges from 210 Euros in Sub-Saharan Africa to 4,140 Euros in North America/Oceania, a gap of 1 to 20 (Figure 12), and health expenditure ranges from 110 Euros to 8,300 Euros, a gap of more than 1 to 70. By 2100, all countries will converge to 8,400 Euros per person for education and 14,400 Euros for health, but this will take decades to achieve equal access to education and health. By 2050, education and health gaps are still projected to be around 1 to 3 in our benchmark scenario.

This reflects the fact that the Global Justice Platform is a relatively moderate, gradualist platform (arguably too moderate and gradualist). Bringing immediate equal access to today's rich-country levels of education and health would require a Global Justice Fund roughly four times larger, around 40 % of world GDP, rather than 10%. Our benchmark proposals trade off ambition against political feasibility and are open to scaling up.

The Global Justice Platform aims at substantial compression of national income and wealth scales over 2026-2100. Global wealth and income taxes are designed both to raise the resources needed by the Global Justice Fund and to curb the concentration of income, wealth, and power at the top of the world distribution. Country-level policies (progressive taxation, minimum wages, pay-scale regulations, labour market rules, workers' representation on corporate boards) are expected to play the leading role in reshaping each country's income distribution in the long run. The income scale within each country is projected to converge to 1 to 5 by 2100; the corresponding steady-state wealth scale to about 1 to 10. The combined effect of between-country convergence and within-country compression brings the share of the global top 10% in post-tax income from 52% today down to 18% in 2100, while the bottom 50% share rises from 8% to 38% (Figure 13).

The wealth picture is even more stark. The share of the bottom 50% of the world’s wealth distribution rises from about 2% today to about 30% by 2100, a 15-fold increase (Figure 14). The wealth share of the world’s billionaire class falls from 6.4% to 0.05%, a decline of more than a hundredfold (Figure 15).

The projected compression of the income and wealth scales is consistent with the long-term trends observed in some of the richest countries in the world, particularly in Western and Nordic Europe. For instance, the ratio between the post-tax income threshold of the 99^th percentile and that of the 10^th percentile (P99/P10) declined from about 32 in 1900 to 3.9 in 1990 in Nordic Europe, and it is projected to decline from about 37 on average today at the world level to 3.3 by 2100. History suggests that this kind of compression does not come at the expense of prosperity. The countries that experienced the most substantial reduction of top-end inequality in the twentieth century (Nordic and Western Europe) are also those that experienced some of the most impressive productivity gains. The United States, where top inequality rose markedly after the 1980s-1990s, did not enjoy faster productivity growth than Western and Nordic Europe over the same period.

A vast majority of the population (about 95–98% in the Global South and 85–95% in the Global North) benefits from the Global Justice Platform in purely monetary terms (Figure 16). At the global level, 89% of the population sees their annual monetary income more than double between 2025 and 2100, while less than 2% experience an income decline. In the poorer regions, gains are nearly universal: about 99% of the population sees more than 100% growth in monetary income, with virtually no income decline.

In the richer regions, the gains are smaller, but the majority still benefit. About 45 % of the population in North America/Oceania and 28 % in Europe at least double their monetary income; a minority (14 % in North America/Oceania and 6 % in Europe) sees their monetary income decline. Those losing out sit essentially at the very top of each country's income distribution. The bottom and middle of the distribution come out ahead, both through rising monetary incomes and through better-funded education and health systems financed by country dividends.

These material benefits come on top of important non-monetary ones: more leisure, less warming, a financed energy transition, and curbing the destabilizing effects of extreme inequality. Once the value of leisure and planetary habitability is taken into account (with all due caution), more than 99% of the world's population is better off in 2100 than today, including in the richest regions.

Nevertheless, the platform is likely to face fierce political opposition, and not only from the ultra-rich. In rich countries, between 10% and 20% of the population would be on the margin of losing out, especially when comparing their situation to alternative high-growth, high-warming trajectories. They could be persuaded that sufficiency, free time and planetary habitability are not worth the trade-off. The cultural and intellectual battle is therefore not only about the taxation of billionaires and multimillionaires; it is also about the value we place on sufficiency, free time and planetary habitability themselves, and the end of “classless ecology”.

The Global Justice Platform requires not only the creation of the Global Justice Fund (GJF) but a broader transformation and democratization of the international economic and monetary system. The GJF itself should be conceived as a new international institution, governed by strict rules of democracy and transparency, with regular budgetary decisions taken under a double-majority rule: 55% of countries representing 60% of the world's population.

This stands in sharp contrast to today's plutocratic system. At the IMF and World Bank, GDP-based voting gives Europe & North America/Oceania roughly four times their share of the world population. At the same time, South & South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa hold only about a quarter of theirs. The Global Justice Platform proposes a transition to one-person-one-vote, immediately or at the latest by 2050 (Figure 17). Beyond the GJF, this implies broader reforms of the international monetary and trade system, including the creation of an International Clearing Union and the transformation of the IMF into a United Nations Central Bank that issues a new international reserve currency to end exorbitant financial privileges.

To a large extent, the current global plutocratic system resembles the wealth- and income-based voting systems that were applied in many countries in Europe and elsewhere in the 19th century and up until the early 20th century (including countries like Sweden, where inequality was at the time deeply embedded in the political system). The shift from global plutocracy to global democracy, which we envision for the 21^st century in the context of the Global Justice Platform, has the same status as the shift from national plutocracy to national democracy that occurred in the 20^th century. It is both a goal and a means.

The Global Justice Platform is based on forward-looking universalist principles, with equal per-capita country dividends for all countries and identical tax schedules everywhere: all billionaires pay the same, whether they come from the North or the South. Because country dividends account for a larger share of GDP in the South, and the global rich predominantly come from the North, the Global Justice Platform (GJP) also implies a form of class-based reparatory justice. In practice, however, the North-South transfers implied by the GJP are relatively modest: about 0.8% of world GDP per year over the 2026–2100 period. This is significantly less than the magnitude of annual transfers that would be required to compensate for the cumulative colonial and climate damages imposed by Europe and North America/Oceania between 1800 and 2025 (about 3%) (Figure 18).

This suggests that the GJP would need to be scaled up to fully account for historical responsibilities and to better approach universal, equal access to education and health. The scaling up could come from more progressive tax schedules and country dividends, or by direct reparations supplementing universal policies.

If necessary, the Global Justice Platform can be implemented with an incomplete coalition of countries, including the absence of the US and/or China. According to our projections, the climate damages imposed by the US on other countries would be about 3% of world GDP per year, on average, over the 2026-2100 period if the US does not participate in the GJP. Under simplifying assumptions, other countries should impose a corrective tax of approximately 80% on all US exports to collect tax revenues approximately equivalent to the damage. Given the projected decline of the US share in world GDP – from 30% in 1945 to 15% in 2025 and 5-10% by 2100 – it is likely that such tariffs would induce the US to join the GJP. The same conclusion applies to the case of China, but with a higher tariff (180% or more).

To conclude, the Global Justice Platform finds that a habitable, equal 21^st century is materially possible. The carbon budget allows it, and history offers precedents at comparable scales, from the rise of universal suffrage to the universalization of health and education to the inequality compression of the 20^th century. What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.