Oxfam, an international confederation of 20 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working together with partners and local communities in more than 90 countries in order to provide support to individuals who live in poverty and deprivation, released on October 07 the third edition of its “Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index (CRII)” report covering the year 2020. The report, a product of the collaboration between Development Finance International (DFI) and Oxfam, ranks governments worldwide based on the efforts they are making to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. The index computed in the report relies on a database of relevant indicators covering a total of 158 countries and measuring government action in three critical areas, namely, public services spending (health, education and social protection), tax progressivity, and labour rights and progressivity. The social spending pillar covers spending on public services specifically, education, health, and social protection and has been shown to have a significant impact on reducing inequality. The progressive taxation component captures the effectiveness of progressive taxes in leading to resource redistribution in society as a key tool for governments to reduce inequality. Finally, the labour rights factor is embedded in the index computation as evidence strongly shows that higher wages to ordinary workers and more labour rights especially to women are essential for inequality reduction. In detail, for each of the three pillars, a country is assigned a score ranging between 0 and 1. These scores are then averaged to give the overall CRI score and respective ranking. The report used the same three pillars as before but adopted a new methodology, with each pillar now incorporating three levels of indicators, namely “policy commitment indicators” (measure the commitment of governments through their policies), “coverage or implementation indicators” (which look at the individuals covered and those who are not covered as a result of policy actions or how well a government implements these policies), and “impact indicators” (measure the impact of policy actions on the different inequality levels). The report mentioned that the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world that was unprepared for it, as countries failed to choose proper policies to combat inequality, noting that only 26 countries assessed in the CRII 2020 managed to spend the recommended 15% on health budgets, and only 53 countries had adequate social protection systems against unemployment and sickness covering only 22% of the global workforce, in addition to one in three workers having no labour protection in 103 countries. As a result, many individuals either perished or suffered from destitution, and inequality increased exponentially. In this vein, the report showed that South Korea managed to effectively combine recovery from COVID-19 and fighting inequality.

Globally, Norway ranked first in the CRII for the year 2020, trailed by Denmark and Germany. On a regional basis, Tunisia topped the list of Arab countries in the 2020 CRII with a global rank of 48. Jordan came in second in the region (global rank: 66) and Algeria came third (global rank: 70). With respect to Lebanon, the country came in 115^th in this year’s index, ranking 105^th globally in “public services spending”, 117^th in “Tax Progressivity”, and 95^th in “labour rights and progressivity”. Nevertheless, the country performed poorly relative to its regional peers, occupying the 8^th place among 12 surveyed countries in the region, outperforming Palestine (global rank: 118), Morocco (global rank: 121), Oman (global rank: 152), and Bahrain (global rank: 156).

On a final note, the report noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the scale of inequality worldwide, urging governments to rapidly commit to reducing inequality. In this vein, the report shed light on the common potential areas for improvement and development and provided a series of recommendations for governments which came as follows: effectively and consistently apply adopted policies so as to keep up to promised plans and stick to commitments when it comes to inequality reduction,  improve the quality and timeliness of data and its collection techniques and accurately and regularly monitor the progress made, analyze the impacts of suggested policies in order to identify those of higher importance and efficiency, and lastly, ensure that COVID-19 vaccines will be free to all countries.