Chapter 4. Political Strategies: Rebuilding Majorities for Equality

Political opposition to the Global Justice Platform is likely to be particularly strong among the global rich, who are clear monetary losers from the GJP – and arguably from any other plausible plan trying to reconcile development goals and climate objectives. A fraction of them might realize that global sustainable convergence and the preservation of planetary habitability are more important than their monetary losses. But many of them – billionaires, centimillionaires, and decamillionaires combined – will spend enormous resources in order to convince large fractions of the population that they will lose from the Global Justice Platform. [2]See e.g. the strong mobilization of billionaires against California’s 5% billionaire tax initiative (2026). There is no magic bullet to address this issue, except trying to be more convincing and as precise as possible regarding the benefits of the GJP, in particular the value of sufficiency, planetary habitability and global convergence, and the fact that the vast majority of the population (about 95-98% in the South and 85-95% in the Global North) will benefit from rising monetary incomes over the 2026-2100 period. Most importantly, nothing can be achieved without a powerful citizen movement and a network of broad-based organizations (including labour unions and political parties) which are sufficiently well organized and effective at promoting the Global Justice Platform (or a similar platform or set of platforms with similar goals). While direct political and electoral processes are central, the success of the GJP will ultimately depend on a broader cultural and intellectual battle about the meaning of sufficiency, equality and prosperity.
 
One difficulty that deserves special attention is the following. For too long, environmental policies did not pay much attention to social inequalities. In many cases, the rhetoric of “classless ecology” and “green growth” – i.e. the idea that it is possible to address environmental challenges by indefinitely increasing the size of the pie and without addressing explicitly the issues of sufficiency and inequality between social classes, neither in terms of unequal responsibilities nor unequal damages – has been routinely used to promote anti-redistributive and inequality-enhancing policies.
 
One caricatural example is the large carbon tax hike that was scheduled in France in 2018. This was a strongly regressive tax (including a high tax burden for average workers using their car to go to work on a daily basis, but full exemption for the kerosene used by those taking airplanes for a week-end), and the revenues were used to finance the wealth tax repeal which was being implemented the very same year (to the benefit of the top 1% taxpayers). This led to massive popular protests – the so-called “yellow vests” movement – so that ultimately the carbon tax hike was abandoned (but the wealth tax repeal was maintained). In practice, “classless ecology” often looks a lot like a mixture of pro-rich ecology and business-friendly greenwashing, i.e. an attempt by free-market liberals to pretend that they are doing something about global warming and planetary habitability while maintaining basically the same neoliberal, productivist policies.
 
A similar but distinct dynamic played out in Ecuador in 2019, when the government announced the removal of longstanding fuel subsidies as part of an IMF-backed austerity package. The subsidies were environmentally problematic, but their removal fell hardest on poor and working-class populations, and particularly on indigenous communities, who depended on affordable fuel for transport and livelihoods. The result was weeks of mass protests led by Indigenous organizations, which forced the government to reverse course. This case shows how countries with limited fiscal space are pressured by international financial institutions into reforms whose burden falls on the poorest. Without the reforms of the international order described above, and without an ambitious platform to reduce socioeconomic inequalities, even well-intentioned environmental policies risk being imposed on those least able to bear their costs and least responsible for the problem in the first place.
 
These kinds of events have contributed to giving mainstream environmental policies a bad name among large segments of lower- and middle-income groups, both in the North and in the South. Most of the time, green policies have been conducted without any explicit consideration for the unequal situation of the various social classes – and especially the enormous responsibilities of the richest classes in environmental degradations. Electoral data shows that green parties generally obtain particularly low scores among low-income voters. [3]See Cagé and Piketty, 2025, Figures 12.23-12.24. Contrary to what is sometime posited, this is not due to the fact that the planet is a luxury good which the poor cannot afford and/or do not care about. If anything, the poorest social classes – both at the world level and within each country – are those who are suffering the most from environmental damages and temperature rise, and who have developed the strongest grassroot mobilisations in order to oppose ongoing degradations. [4]See the pioneering work of Martinez-Allier (2002) on the “environmentalism of the poor”. The problem is that most governments since the 1980s-1990s – whether they come from the centre-left or the centre-right – have been following neoliberal policies based on the premise that economic deregulation and capital flows liberalization can solve all problems. [5]See Abdelal (2007). They did not pay much attention to rising social inequalities in general, and in particular to the class dimension of environmental policies. The perception that mainstream green policies are inherently anti-poor and do not ask their fair share to the richest groups is now so entrenched that there is arguably no easy way out.
 
In our view, the only solution is to break away in a very clear and visible manner from the illusion of “classless ecology” and to prioritize the promotion of socioeconomic equality and worker rights along with environmental goals. In the Global Justice Platform, ambitious quantified targets on GHG emissions and temperature rise come together with similarly ambitious quantified goals on education and health expenditures, rising incomes and wages for the bottom 80-90% and a sharp compression of the distribution of income, wealth and power in all countries. The financing of the platform falls entirely on the global rich, again with fully specified trajectories regarding tax rates and revenues, investment flows and country dividends. By providing a fully specified redistributive programme which breaks deliberately and abruptly with decades of neoliberalism, the GJP aims to transform popular perceptions about equality and ecology. Whether this will suffice – and how much this needs to be amended – largely depends on the political strategies that will be followed at the local and national levels.

By cutting across country lines and replacing them by internationalist class lines, the Global Justice Platform has the potential to generate large majority approval in all countries. In practice, the main challenge which political parties and other collective organizations supporting the GJP – or any similar platform – will have to confront is to reconcile the global, the national and the local perspectives. The global objectives offered by the GJP – e.g. regarding GHG emissions, temperatures, global wealth taxation or the World Sovereign Fund – can be an asset in a political campaign, but they can also seem somewhat abstract and distant. In order to make the GJP more concrete, it is critical to emphasize – and illustrate with examples – how country dividends can be used to finance education and health expenditures at the local level and how WSF investment flows can help finance energy and transportation infrastructures and create sustainable jobs in specific municipalities.
 
One central difficulty is that it might take a while before the GJP can fully materialize. In the meantime, it is critical that parties and organizations supporting the GJP are able to put in place successful redistributive policies at the national and local levels. The ideal policy mix depends on the specific political and socioeconomic context of each country, and a complete analysis of such country-level policy platforms goes well beyond the scope of this report. One general issue which deserves particular attention is the fact that rising social inequalities since the 1980s-1990s have been accompanied in many countries by the return of large territorial divides, especially between small cities and large agglomerations. This follows from multiple factors, including unequal access to universities, health, transport, and other public services between territories, as well as differences in sectoral and occupational structures and trade exposures. This has contributed to a more general transformation in the structure of electoral cleavages, including a gradual disconnection between income, property, and education divides, as well as a rising political division between the rural poor and the urban poor, at levels unseen for a century. [6]See Gethin, Martinez-Toledano and Piketty (2021) and Cagé and Piketty (2025). In practice, the growing disconnection between property and education divides is closely related to rising territorial divides, as it is relatively easier to access property ownership in small cities and rural areas and to access universities in large agglomerations, with a growing gap in recent decades. Reducing these territorial divides is a critical step in the reconstruction of political majorities in favour of equality. Probably the best tool to achieve this goal is a massive investment plan to improve access to high-quality public services for lower- and middle-income households, both in small cities and rural areas and in Iarge agglomerations. Top-end progressive taxation of income and wealth plays a key role here, both to finance new public expenditure and to improve access of modest households to housing and credit. [7]E.g. by cutting property taxes or other regressive taxes paid by lower- and middle-income households and/or via interest-free loans or capital endowments. See Piketty (2022) and Cagé and Piketty (2025).          
 
Another area where national- and local-level policies can make a large difference has to do with workplace democracy, including increased voice for workers and improved opportunities to negotiate better wages and work conditions. For instance, the co-management rules that have been applied in Germany and Nordic Europe since 1950 (with up to 50% of voting rights for workers representatives in corporate boards in large companies) could be extended to all countries and companies. [8]This could come together with a limitation of voting rights to 10% for individual shareholders in large corporations. See the discussion in Chapter 2. In recent years, there has also been a new wave of innovative proposals on democracy at work, [9]See in particular Ferreras et al (2022, 2026), McGaughey (2017a, 2017b) & Ewing et al (2018). See also Guinan and O’Neill (2020) on Meidner-type employee funds and community wealth and Tcherneva (2020) on job guarantee system operated by municipalities and non-profit organizations. This could be supplemented by wage funds receiving compulsory contributions from high-wage firms and transferring compensations to those with low wages. This is equivalent to progressive wage taxes and subsidies except that this is explicitly tied to decentralized decision-making processes and economic democracy.  anti-discrimination rules and gender equality. [10]See e.g. Arruza, Bhattacharya and Fraser (2019). In the context of the GJP, policies aimed at reducing work hours and equalizing pay and labour time (economic and domestic) between women and men are projected to be addressed for the most part at the country level, and they will require very strong mobilization to be adopted, in line with historical experience. In addition, new policy tools are likely to be needed in order to rebalance power relations within households. [11]See the discussion in Chapter 1. Finally, the rewriting of existing rules regarding the financing of political campaigns and the governance of the media should also be viewed as top priorities for any meaningful change to take place, and this is again an area which is primarily handled at the national level (although global cooperation could also help). [12]See Cagé (2020, 2024).
 
To summarize, it is first and mostly through national-level and local-level policies that parties and organizations supporting the GJP – or any similar global platform – have a chance to win elections and remain in power, at least in the short run. That being said, it is also critical in our view that they support a global platform like the GJP, first because this will eventually bring additional fiscal resources to fund domestic expenditures and reduce inequality, and next and most importantly because this is the only way to address global development and planetary habitability concerns. Voters are now well aware that climate change cannot be properly handled by individual countries alone, and that low-development traps are not only unfair for those born in poor countries but also carry significant consequences for other countries (including migration pressures). Political parties, labour unions and other collective organizations need to take a credible stand on global development and climate change, trade agreements, and international relations, and more generally on the transformation of the global economic and financial system. For instance, trade treaties are permanently being renegotiated (most recently the EU-Mercosur agreement), [13]Many European political parties, labour unions, and producers associations oppose this agreement on the basis of continuing deforestation taking place in Latin America. While this is understandable, it would be preferable in our view if this came with explicit proposals to create GJP-type global wealth and income taxes in order to finance an alternative development model (so that in effect Latin American countries are compensated for ending deforestation). and annual COP meetings take place in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (with multiple discussions and persistent North-South disagreements on the financing of adaptation and mitigation climate funds). [14]Here again, the natural would be to propose GJP-type global taxes financing climate funds. Supporting the GJP (or other platforms trying to combine domestic and global objectives) is complementary – not substitutable – to the pursuit of socioeconomic equality and labour rights at the local and national level. Not taking a stand on global issues is not an option.     
 
How long will it take before the Global Justice Platform (or a similar platform) can realistically be adopted and implemented? While we are not in a position to predict which popular mobilizations, environmental disasters, geopolitical crises or other sequences of events will lead to political change, several remarks are in order.
 
First, the Global Justice Platform can be implemented with an incomplete coalition of countries. It would obviously be preferable to have all countries on board. At the very least, the initial coalition should include some of the main countries from the North (especially the richest countries in Europe and East Asia) and from the South (e.g. Brazil, India, South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, etc.). However, if necessary, the GJP can also start without some of the largest countries, and in particular without the US and/or China. We will return to this discussion later.
 
In our benchmark scenario, we assume that the GJP begins to operate in 2026 and that the first country dividends are distributed in 2027. While this is technically possible, it is probably more realistic politically to imagine that it will take at least a few years to form a large North-South coalition, so that the starting date could be 2030 or 2035 or later. Postponing the starting date has relatively little impact on the general logic of the GJP or on the main orders of magnitudes regarding revenues and expenses. However, it does have a very large impact on projections for cumulated GHG emissions and global warming. The later the starting date, the more difficult it is to limit temperature rise below 2°C or even 2.5°C. Consequently, delaying action increases the importance of starting the process and scaling it up quickly to limit damages. In any case, the problems which the GJP is trying to solve are unlikely to go away by themselves. According to our simulations, temperature will rise beyond 4°C-4.5°C under the various alternative scenarios under consideration, implying very high probabilities of major climate catastrophes and tipping points.   
 
We also stress that the Global Justice Platform should not be viewed as an all-or-nothing platform. The magnitude of the Global Justice Fund and the Sovereign Wealth Fund have been set so as to reach the desired targets in terms global socioeconomic convergence (including adequate levels of education and health expenditure) and planetary habitability (temperature rise below 2°C). However, disagreements about these estimates and conclusions are perfectly acceptable, and it is obviously possible to promote certain aspects of the GJP and not others, or more generally to use the GJP as a toolbox (e.g. by using the global wealth tax to finance adaptation funds or compensations for reforestation in trade agreements). We will later return to the difficult question of the right level of gradualism and radicalism, which in our view is very much an open question. The most important issue is to be very clear and transparent about what can be achieved with the various policy platforms under consideration.  
 
Finally, we stress again that the Social-Democratic Revolution of the 20^th century took place relatively fast – and in a way that was largely unexpected at the time. In some cases, wars and depressions arguably played an important role to accelerate the process – and it is possible that climate crises and other geopolitical catastrophes will play a similar role in the future. In other instances, e.g. in Nordic countries like Sweden, which used to be one of the most plutocratic countries in the early 20^th century, popular mobilisations and a well-organized labour movement (rather than wars and catastrophes) played the leading role. In any case, the historical record demonstrates that institutional transformations and policy changes of great magnitude can occur in a relatively short period of time when the social pressures for change are sufficiently strong. It is also striking to see that the social-democratic agenda – including a shift of public expenditure from less than 10% of GDP to about 40-50% of GDP over the course of the 20^th century, a large sustained rise of public services and a gradual decommodification of the economy – has become almost consensual after a few decades, up to a point where no significant political force is seriously proposing the economic order which prevailed until 1910. In short, we do not know when changes will occur and in which form, but we know from history that the recurrent conservative prediction of a frozen future is likely to be off-road.

In order to be adopted and implemented, the Global Justice Platform requires a better understanding between the North and the South and a shared ability to construct mutually acceptable visions of global socioeconomic justice, i.e. shared narratives about the past and about the future. From this perspective, it is particularly important to emphasize the complementarity between the logic of universal, forward-looking justice and the logic of reparatory justice, which are both present in the Global Justice Platform. The GJP is dedicated to global socioeconomic convergence and the financing of the energy transition and sustainable development on a global scale over the 2026-2100 period. In practice, the financial needs of the GJP are met in priority by the global rich, who have benefited disproportionately from global economic growth in recent decades and face a major historical responsibility in the accumulation of GHG emissions since the industrial revolution, and particularly over the 1970-2025 period, a critical period that is responsible for more than 70% of total cumulated emissions since 1800. To put it bluntly, the billionaires and other multimillionaires of 2026 would never have been able to accumulate so much wealth without these enormous global emissions. They have been the prime beneficiaries of the global economic system leading to the current situation of rising temperature, with particularly negative environmental consequences for the inhabitants of the poorest countries on Earth (especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and South & Southeast Asia). It is therefore perfectly legitimate in our view that they become the prime contributors to the redistribution of income and wealth that is now necessary to repair the damages and to reconcile global socioeconomic convergence and the preservation of planetary habitability.
 
More generally, the development of Western industrial capitalism since the 18^th century is closely linked to a system based on the international division of labour, the mobilization of natural and human resources at the world level, and the European powers’ military and colonial domination over the rest of the planet. [15]See for instance Pomeranz (2000), Parthasarathi (2011) and Beckert (2014). E.g. it is hard to see how Europe’s textile manufacturing sector could have developed with an autarkic Europe using only home-made cotton. This does not imply that cotton-producing slave plantations were a necessary condition for the industrial revolution. Economic development could probably have happened with different institutions (e.g. with paid labour rather than with slave labour to produce cotton and other raw commodities), but this implies that Western manufacturers would have paid a higher price for these commodities, and therefore that some other countries and social classes within these countries would have had more resources to follow another development trajectory. In summary, the entire history of wealth creation and accumulation since the industrial revolution is the result of a collective global process involving specific institutions and power relations, including numerous episodes of massive injustices and large-scale human and environmental damage. The distribution of income and wealth resulting from this complex and conflictual historical process should not be sacralized in any way. Instead, we should start from the common objectives – global socioeconomic convergence and planetary habitability – and adjust the institutions and policies so as to fulfill these objectives, using the best available historical evidence regarding the relation between development, equality, and sustainability.
 
In effect, the approach to universal, forward-looking justice promoted by the Global Justice Platform can also be viewed as a form of class-based reparatory justice. The forward-looking dimension is critical, especially if the objective is to convince broad majority in all countries to approve this course of action. It would make little sense to focus on reparations for previous damages (e.g. colonial and/or environmental damages) without describing precisely how the resources coming from reparations could be used to promote an inclusive development trajectory for the future. The class-based dimension is also critical. If we were to adopt a pure country-based perspective, with an exclusive focus on between-country transfers, both from an historical perspective and for the future development trajectories, without taking into account the class dimension, then it would be impossible to promote a meaningful approach to global justice. For example, consider the case of a distant descendant of a white slave owner in France or Britain who is now poor and does not own anything. Conversely, imagine the case of a descendant of a slave or a colonized worker in Nigeria or India who is now a billionaire. There is little reason in principle why the first individual should be required to pay a transfer or to work for free for the second individual. The class-based, forward-looking approach is in some ways more satisfactory, because it is both universal in its principles and reparatory in its effects, as in practice there are many more billionaires in the North than in the South, reflecting the fact that the over-exploitation of planetary resources has been both a class-based and a geography-based process from an historical standpoint. But this approach also has its own limitations. In particular, it is critical to check whether the specific universalist policy that is being advocated is sufficiently massive and progressive to compensate for observed historical damages – otherwise the rhetoric of universalism might just be a way to escape the required compensation. [16]See Kanitkar et al (2019, 2024) and the Climate Equity Monitor (CEM) initiative for a discussion on how to operationalize the concept of climate equity in the context of very unequal historical responsibilities and the risks associated to exclusively forward-focused approaches.   
 
For instance, country dividends are allocated by the Global Justice Fund on an equal per-capita basis. This is as universalist as it can get: each inhabitant of the world is receiving (via its government) the same per capita amount to finance climate investment and education and health expenditure. But because some countries are poorer than others, partly due to past injustices, the country dividends do represent a substantially larger share of GDP in the South than in the North. For example, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa receive on average 8.8% of their GDP in country dividends over the 2026-2100 period, while countries in Europe are receiving 2.5%, with a world average equal to 4.3%. [17]See Bothe et al, 2026, Table 3. The question is whether the implied implicit transfer is sufficient to compensate for past damages.
 
Similarly, global wealth tax and income taxes are paid to the Global Justice Fund on the basis of similar tax schedules for all inhabitants of the world, irrespective of where they come from, with wealth and income thresholds expressed as a function of world averages. This also follows a universalist perspective: for a given wealth or income level, each inhabitant of the world is paying the same tax. But because some countries are richer than others and have more high-wealth and high-income individuals than others, partly due to past injustices, these tax payments do represent a substantially larger share of GDP in the North than in the South. For instance, countries in in Sub-Saharan Africa are scheduled to pay on average 1.1% of their GDP in global tax revenues over the 2026-2100 period, while countries in North America/Oceania are paying 4.2%, with a world average equal to 2.8%. [18]See Bothe et al, 2026, Table 9 and Appendix Tables E2c-E2d. Again, the question is whether this is going sufficiently far.
 
In order to address this question, we use these estimates to compute the implicit between-country transfers orchestrated by the Global Justice Fund. We find that over the course of 2026-2100 period, Europe and North America/Oceania are projected to pay the equivalent of 0.8% of world GDP per year on average to the GJF, while Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to receive 0.4% of world GDP per year, South & South-East Asia 0.2% and Latin America 0.1%. [19]See Bothe et al; 2026, Table 10 and Appendix Table E2e for detailed estimates by subperiod. Over the 2026-2060 period, Europe and North America/Oceania are projected to pay the equivalent of 1.4-1.5% of world GDP per year on average to the GJF, while Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to receive 0.8%, South & South-East Asia 0.5% and Latin America 0.2%. While these are substantial transfers, they are not as large as one might have expected given the overall size of the GJF. This is because the GJF has been purposedly designed to finance climate investment and human capital expenditure in all countries (and not only in the poorest countries). In effect, lower- and middle-income groups in the North benefit from GJF country dividends. This reduces North-South transfers, but this is also what contributes to raise political support – or rather to limit hostility – in the North.
 
We should also stress that these estimates need to be interpreted very cautiously. First, these between-country transfers are computed in reference to a situation where each country would be paying the same GDP share in global wealth and income taxes and receiving the same GDP share in country dividends, and it is absolutely unclear why such a reference point has any particular interest or is especially meaningful. In our view, a more meaningful universalist norm is that used by the Global Justice Fund: country dividends are allocated on a per capita equal basis, and tax payments are paid on the basis of individual wealth and income levels, irrespective of your country. Next, this notion of “between-country transfers” is implicitly assuming that top wealth and top income individuals “belong” to a particular country – i.e. French billionaires belong to France, Nigerian billionaires belong to Nigeria, etc. This is far from clear, first because the wealth of French or Nigerian billionaires was accumulated in the context of global economic system which would not exist without the mobilization of natural and human resources at the world level, and next because the ability of French or Nigerian tax authorities to collect tax from “their” billionaires should not be exaggerated. The development of new institutions like the Global Justice Fund also changes the ability of countries to tax the various social classes of the world. In other words, any notion of “cross-country transfer” is defined relative to a particular historical and institutional context, implying that such notions should not be essentialized.

That being said, these estimates of cross-country transfers – no matter how cautiously they should be interpreted – are useful to make comparisons with other cross-country transfers which took place in the past, and in particular to the colonial and climate damages imposed by Western countries on the Global South. We stress again that all estimates of cross-country transfers – whether they relate to the past or the future – are subject to caution and are by construction highly uncertain. One striking conclusion, however, is that the size of GJF between-country transfers appears to be relatively small as compared to existing estimates of colonial and climate damages.
 
Before we present this comparison, it is useful to describe how existing estimates of colonial and climate damages have been computed. Generally speaking, there exists a large and growing literature attempting to estimate colonial and climate damages, in relation to the vivid global discussions on colonial and climate reparations.            
 
Regarding colonial damages, and in particular the damages imposed by the transatlantic slave trade system, the most sophisticated available estimates are those that were recently proposed in the “Report on Reparations for Transatlantic Chattel Slavery in the Americas and the Caribbeans” published by the American Society for International Law (ASIL) and the Center for Reparations Research (CRR, University of West Indies) (see Bazelon et al, 2023, and Robinson, 2023). These ASIL-CRR computations are also important because they have been adopted as reference estimates by a number of governments and international organizations, including the Reparations Commission of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the African Union. These estimates also play a major role and are frequently referred to in several declarations on enslavement and reparations which were adopted by the UN General Assembly in recent years and months. [20]See the “Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime against Humanity” adopted in March 2026. In addition, one key strength the ASIL-CRR estimates is that they are very transparent and clearly explained. To summarize, the authors start from an estimate of the unpaid wages which the approximately 20 million enslaved victims of transatlantic slavery should have received over the 1450-1888 period (most of them over the 1780-1860 period, which corresponds to the peak of the transatlantic slave trade system and the outbreak of the industrial revolution). They then add an estimate of the damages corresponding to various punishments and mistreatments imposed on slaves (presumably to raise productivity), which they estimate to be roughly of the same order of magnitude as unpaid wages. According to the ASIL-CRR estimates, the total damages imposed on slaves by the transatlantic slave system amount to approximately 100-120% of world GDP in 2020. While this may seem very large, the authors of the report rightly stress that these are damages accumulated over very long time periods, so they should rather be compared to total cumulated world GDP over similarly long period. For instance, they emphasize that these total damages represent only 2-3% of cumulated world GDP over the 1800-2020 period (and up to 13% in the case of Britain). [21]According to the ASIL-CRR estimates, total damages amount around 100-120% of world GDP (about 100-120 trillion dollars in 2020), including as much as 600% of British GDP for the damages imposed by Britain, 300% of French GDP for the damages imposed by France, and 150% of US GDP for the damages imposed by the US. While this seems very large, the authors stress that this makes only 13% of cumulated British GDP since 1800 in the case of Britain and only 4% of cumulated US GDP for the case of the US.  See Bazelon et al (2023) and Robinson (2023). In other words, the point is not to say the entirety of wealth creation since 1800 was due to slavery or colonialism, but rather that a significant fraction can be attributed to these processes.  
 
It is also important to take into account other colonial damages, including fiscal transfers and war tributes imposed by Britain to India, by the Netherlands to Indonesia, by France on Haïti, and so on. Recent research by Nievas and Piketty (2025) on historical balance of payments at the world level since 1800 shows that the corresponding damages are equivalent to about 70% of world GDP in 2025. [22]Net colonial transfers are estimated to represent about 0.5% of world GDP on average over the 1800-1900 period and 0.4% over the 1900-1960 period, i.e. around 70% of world GDP in total. See Nievas and Piketty (2025, Figure 25). Nievas and Piketty also provide estimates of the transfers due to unequal exchange (e.g. low commodity prices, partly due to forced labour), which appear to be comparable to ASIL-CRR estimates (approximated 1.5% of world GDP per year over the 1800-1870 period, i.e. about 110% of world GDP in total). Note that the Nievas-Piketty estimates cover a shorter period than the ASIL-CRR estimates and do not explicitly include a valuation for mistreatments. On the other hand, they take a broader view of unequal exchange and forced labour. In practice, the various differences in scope and methods tend to compensate each other, so that aggregate estimates are relatively close. It should be pointed out that all of these estimates (both the slavery damages and other colonial damages) are computed using a conservative lower bound value for the capitalization factor (namely the world economy’s nominal growth rate),  and that they would be a lot larger if we were using higher – and arguably more meaningful – rates of return. [23]Because we capitalize all past amounts using the world economy nominal growth rate, a damage equal to 1% of world GDP in 1800 is worth 1% of world GDP in 2025. In practice the returns to capital are significantly larger than the nominal growth rate (i.e. R>G, both at the world level and at the country and regional levels; see e.g. Bauluz et al, 2025, Figures 29-30), meaning that the damaged countries could have obtained much larger amounts by investing these amounts (including in education, public infrastructures, etc.). See Nievas and Piketty (2025) for an analysis of counterfactual development scenario along these lines. The ASIL-CRR estimates also a capitalization factor which in practice is close to the nominal growth rate. Note that using a return that is just a little bit above the nominal growth rate (say by 1% per year) can raise enormously all amounts when it is capitalized over long periods (e.g. 1.01²⁰⁰=7.3). Conversely, in case one uses a capitalization factor that is smaller than the nominal growth rate, for instance if one uses the nominal price index (as is frequently done), then by construction all amounts coming from the past will look artificially small. In our view, using the nominal growth rate provides a simple, meaningful lower-bound capitalization factor which can help clarify the discussion and the orders of magnitudes which are at stake in these debates.
 
Finally, we add indicative estimates of cumulated climate damages over the 1800-2025 period (around 60% of world GDP in 2025) and compute total estimates of colonial and climate damages (about 240% of world GDP), which we report on Figure 4.1. [24]See Bothe et al, 2026, Section 8.2 and Appendix Figures T1a-T1f, T2a-T2f and T3a-T3f.

When we translate these damages into annual reparations over the 2026-2100 period, we find that the amounts are significantly larger than the North-South transfers orchestrated by the Global Justice Fund. That is, GJF implicit North-South transfers represent the equivalent of about 0.8% of world GDP per year over the 2026-2100 period, as compared to 3.2% of world GDP per year during the same period in order to compensate for colonial and climate damages (Figure 4.2).

Note that climate damages in our benchmark computations (about 60% of world GDP by 2025) look relatively moderate as compared to colonial damages (180% of world GDP, including 110% for slavery and 70% for other colonial damages). This is entirely due, however, to the fact that we look only at climate damages imposed up to 2025, and that most of the temperature rise and associated damages are yet to come. For instance, the potential climate damages imposed during the 2026-2100 by non-cooperative countries are projected to be a lot larger (100-200% of world GDP or more, depending on the size of the country), as we see below. While our estimates of climate damages are based on simplistic first-pass calculations intended to provide an order-of-magnitude approximation, alternative estimates proposed by other researchers – including Callahan and Mankin (2022) and Fanning and Heckel (2023) – are broadly consistent with ours, despite several methodological differences. [25]See Bothe et al, 2026, Section 8.2. Generally speaking, we should stress that there is no perfect way – and there will be never a perfect way – to translate the principle of climate equity and historical responsibilities into quantified policies. All existing estimates rely on plausible thought experiments and counterfactual scenarios to approach this fundamental question. [26]For instance, our estimates rely on the choice of a k factor measuring how much rich countries should have reduced their cumulated emissions in the past (e.g. by using less fossil fuels and developing alternative energy sources and production, transportation and heating systems). The estimates by Callahan and Mankin (2022) rely on the “one country out” counterfactual experiment (i.e. they estimate the climate and GDP impact of taking out one by one each country’s historical emissions). All these methods make sense and we find It difficult to rank them in any meaningful way. Ultimately it is up to democratic deliberation to weight these different pieces of evidence and use the natural language – together with mathematical and statistical language – in order to communicate meaningful arguments to others and reach a collective decision.

To summarize, the implicit North-South country transfers orchestrated by the Global Justice Platform – in particular via the Global Justice Fund – appear to be significantly smaller than what would be required to address the historical responsibilities implied by colonial and climate damages. This is consistent with our findings regarding the long march toward equal access to education and health. That is, in order to provide full equal access in the immediate future – rather than by 2100 – the Global Justice Fund would need to be approximately four times larger, i.e. around 40% of world GDP in annual expenses rather than 10% (see the discussion in Chapter 2). Note also that it is not entirely a coincidence that the logic of reparatory justice and the logic of forward-looking, universal justice both lead to the conclusion that the Global Justice Platform should be scaled up. The point is that colonial and climate damages explain a significant part of the inequality of opportunities that we see today between countries. If it was explaining the entirety of this inequality, then both approaches would lead to approximately the same magnitude of just redistribution. In practice, estimated historical damages appear to be explaining less than the entirety of the gap, which is why universal justice tends to lead to even larger redistribution than reparatory justice.
 
There are different ways to scale up the Global Justice Platform in order to meet the principles of historical responsibilities and reparatory justice – and also to better address the principles of universal justice. The simplest change is to raise the overall size of the Global Justice Fund, for example by applying larger and more progressive tax rates for the global wealth and income taxes, leading to higher per capita country dividends. In effect, this would also increase the level of North-South transfers. This could raise issues in terms of political acceptability. But in case it is possible to convince citizens in the North and in the South that this is the way to go, then this is perfectly doable. According to recent research, popular support for global redistribution appears to be greater than commonly thought. [27]See Fabre, 2025 and Fabre et al, 2025. See also Cappelen, Støstad and Tungodden, 2025. Note that these studies do not include an explicit long-term target for global convergence and planetary habitability as potential outcomes of international redistribution, which could potentially raise support for redistribution to even larger levels. On the other hand, they do not attempt to measure the negative impact of real-life anti-redistribution discourses (which can sometimes be quite persuasive, especially if they are well financed; see Cagé, 2020, 2024).
 
The second possible change is to have larger per capita country dividends for some countries (say, for India or Nigeria rather than for France or Britain), on the basis of the fact that this is the only way to implement full compensation for past colonial and climate damages and higher present exposure to climate change. This would naturally be the most direct way to raise North-South transfers. One could also imagine country-specific global wealth and income tax schedules. For instance, billionaires from India or Nigeria would still pay the global wealth tax, but billionaires from France or Britain or the US would pay an even larger wealth tax, for a given wealth level, on the basis that they are responsible for a larger part of historical colonial and climate damages. This would certainly make the Global Justice Fund more complex in its functioning and presentation than the “universal” per capita dividends and tax schedules that we envision in our benchmark scenario. But if this is the only way to have full compensation for historical damages, and if it is possible to build political support for such a platform, then this is the path which should be followed.
 
Finally, it is very important in our view to consider the possibility of supplementing the Global Justice Platform with country-specific transfers and reparations. One particularly extreme and well-known case is that of Haïti, which was forced by France to pay a colonial tribute equal to about 300% of Haïti’s GDP in 1825, in order to compensate French slave-owners for the loss of what used to be their property. A number of scholars have stressed that it is not too late for France to pay back the equivalent of 300% of today’s Haïtian GDP (i.e. less than 2% of French GDP). [28]See e.g. Piketty (2020, 2022). In the context of the Global Justice Platform, these payments could be located in the Global Justice Fund in order to finance specific investment in infrastructures and education and health expenditure which could accelerate convergence in the case of Haïti. Note that this approach to reparations – via collective regional funds which could be used for public investment – is the same as that defended by the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission in the context of post-slavery reparations in general (see also Bazelon et al (2023) and Robinson (2023)). Similarly, one could imagine direct transfers from Britain to India in order to compensate for direct fiscal extraction (Home Charges and similar flows) that were made during the colonial period, and equivalent transfers from the Netherlands to Indonesia. [29]See Nogues-Marco (2021), Patnaik and Patnaik (2021) and Nievas and Piketty (2025). Forced labour was also used in some colonial empires as part of their fiscal resources up until World War II, in particular in West Africa under French rule. [30]See van Waijenburg (2018). It seems difficult to refuse all direct reparations in relation to these very well documented damages, especially given that other damages which happened during WW2 (or sometimes during WW1) are still being compensated today. Finally, the countries which benefited hugely from GHG emissions – e.g. Norway or other oil producers – could face a specific taxation on the basis of their accumulated sovereign fund (and not just by taxing the private wealth of their billionaires). We should make clear that we are not in a position to give a complete list of these country-specific transfers and reparations, and that this is supposed to supplement – not to replace – the more universal mechanisms orchestrated by the Global Justice Fund.
 
Generally speaking, we stress that these discussions about past damages and reparations are likely to be difficult and to meet strong opposition in the North, where alternative narratives tend to stress the supposedly positive historical externalities brought by Western institutions and inventions to the rest of world. [31]One difficulty is that these supposedly positive externalities are very difficult to demonstrate and quantify, in contrast to the damages caused by slavery (unpaid wages, harsh working conditions) and colonial transfers, which are very well documented. Note also that countries from the South are arguably facing other negative externalities from the North, in particular the fact that it is difficult to develop when a country’s highest skill groups have a strong incentive to migrate to rich countries (an issue which rich countries were not exposed to with the same magnitude during their own development trajectory). At the end of the day, the best strategy to undo nationalist biases might be to demonstrate through the construction of new international institutions and country-level policies that a platform like the GJP can bring concrete development successes, after which it could be easier to scale up the policies and reach a better mutual understanding and recognition of past experiences. One reason for optimism is the strong support for international solidarity and redistribution documented in recent research, and also the fact that younger generations tend to be more exposed to shared global narratives.        
   

We now move to another crucial question, namely the extent to which it is possible to implement the Global Justice Platform with an incomplete coalition of countries, and in particular without some of the largest countries (typically the US and/or China). Our general conclusion is the following. While it is obviously preferable to put in place the Global Justice Platform with all countries, it is also possible if needed to implement the most important features of the GJP with an incomplete coalition of countries (including without the US and/or China), assuming that the remaining coalition is sufficiently large and cohesive and is prepared to impose adequate sanctions to non-participants, in proportion to the damages they impose on participating countries.
 
Assume, for instance, that the US does not participate in the GJP and that all other countries do participate. Further assume that the US follows the “Slow Decarbonization” trajectory, while other countries follow the “Fast Decarbonization” trajectory. [32]More precisely, we assume that the US follows the PI-SC trajectory (i.e. Persistent Inequality/ Slow Decarbonization, with no reduction in work hours, no shift to immaterial sectors or in food habits, etc.), while other countries follow the SC-FC trajectory (Sustainable Convergence/Fast Decarbonization). See Bothe et al (2026) and Chancel et al (2026) for full details. According to our projections, the extra GHG emissions coming from the US over the 2026-2100 period would lead to rise in temperature from 1.8°C to 2.0°C (Figure 4.3). In order words, other countries would still be able to limit global warming to close to 2°C. On the other hand, the projected damages imposed on other countries could be substantial: about 3.0% of world GDP per year on average over the 2026-2100 period (i.e. a cumulated damage larger than 200% of world GDP between 2026 and 2100). [33]Using our benchmark parameters on the impact of temperature rise on GDP and well-being losses. One possible retaliation strategy for GJP countries would be to impose a corrective tax of about 80% on all US exports throughout the 2026-2100 period, so as to collect a projected tax revenue that is approximately equivalent to the damage.

Now assume that China does not participate to the GJP and that all other countries do participate. According to our projections, the extra GHG emissions coming from China would lead to rise of temperature from 1.8°C to 2.3°C (Figure 4.4). The impact would be larger than with the US dropping out, due to the larger size of the Chinese economy over the 2026-2100 period.  The projected damages would be enormous (about 8.3% of world GDP per year on average over the 2026-2100, i.e. a cumulated damage larger than 500% of world GDP between 2026 and 2100) and the corrective tax on Chinese exports would need to be as large as 180% or more. [34]These sanctions are substantially larger than those computed in some of the literature on climate clubs (see e.g. Nordhaus, 2015), first because we use more recent (and arguably more plausible) estimates of climate damages, and next and because damages are estimated in the context of a model trying to reconcile global socioeconomic convergence with the preservation of planetary habitability.

We should make clear that the objective is to keep these countries in the Global Justice Platform and that in our view such corrective taxes are likely to make them stay in GJP. It is very difficult, however, to make precise computations about this. A complete analysis of optimal sanctions and their likely impact would need to take into account all multisectoral global linkages, and also the role of financial sanctions, which would look very different following our proposed reform of the international financial system (even if this reform is adopted with an incomplete coalition of countries). Given the fact that each individual country – including the US and China – is scheduled to reduce its influence over the course of the 21^st century, leading a relatively multipolar structure (see Figures 3.8a-3.8d), our intuition is that it will be very difficult for any single country to resist adequate pressure and sanctions in case other countries in the rest of the world (or at least the vast majority of other countries) are sufficiently determined to join the Global Justice Platform (or a similar platform) and to make it work. But a full-fledged analysis of the relevant structure of coalitions and sanctions which could make this process successful remains to be produced, and falls outside the scope of the present report. 

In our view, the set of institutional transformations and policy changes included in the Global Justice Platform corresponds to a relatively moderate and gradualist strategy. Probably the best illustration is the fact that the very large existing inequality of access to education and health between poor and rich countries is reduced only very gradually in our benchmark scenario. In effect, it will take the whole 21^st century to reach equality of opportunities in access to education and health for all inhabitants of the planet, whether they are born in poor or rich countries (Figures 2.5a-2.6b). A more ambitious scenario would involve faster implementation of the principle of equal access to education and health. This would require an annual budget that is up to four times larger than the one proposed in our benchmark scenario (about 40% of world GDP rather than 10%) (Figure 4.5). Another complementary illustration of the moderate and gradualist nature of GJP proposals is the fact that the induced transfers are relatively small as compared to historical colonial and climate damages.

Some readers will find the Global Justice Platform to be too gradualist or moderate. As we noted, we strongly support all strategies to scale up the size and scope of the Global Justice Fund and to complement the platform with other policies, including country-specific transfers and reparations. The same remark applies to our proposed transformation of the global socioeconomic system and the property regime, including the new balance between public and private wealth and the extension of economic democracy and workers’ voting rights in corporations and other organizations. In our view, it has the potential in the long-run to fundamentally reshape the structure of power relations and to lead to a gradual decommodification of the economic system. Critics will find these proposals too gradualist, especially regarding the speed at which property relations and profit-making motives are being redefined and the economy as a whole is being decommodified. We share these criticisms and welcome all alternative proposals and political strategies which could accelerate the process.
 
Conversely, others might consider that the Global Justice Platform is already too radical. In our benchmark scenario, the revenues and expenses of the Global Justice Fund represent about 10% of world GDP per year over the 2026-2060 period. This represents a lot more resources than the total combined resources which are currently allocated to development aid or international organizations (less than 0.4% of world GDP). This also represents a lot less than what would be needed in order to implement immediate equal opportunities (about 40% of the world GDP). We should again emphasize that we do not have satisfactory answers to all questions and that many choices are open for discussion and deliberation. We also stress that very gradualist strategies – for instance the 2% minimal wealth tax advocated during the G20 Brazilian presidency in 2024 – can in some cases be very useful. [35]See Zucman (2024). Expected revenues are 200-250 billion $ per year (about 0.2% of world GDP). Historically, top income tax rates were very small when income taxes were created around or before World War 1, often around 2-5% at the time of initial parliamentary adoption, and in the space of a few years they jumped to 80-90%. [36]See e.g. Piketty (2022, Figures 20-21). We consider all these different approaches complementary to each other, and we are not in a position to decide in advance which one is most likely to be successful. What is critical in our view is to be very clear about what can be achieved regarding global socioeconomic convergence and planetary habitability with the various platforms and policies under consideration. We very much hope that the material presented in this report can help to clarify these issues.