From Disparity to Dignity: Tackling Economic Inequality through the Sustainable Development Goals

From Disparity to Dignity: Tackling economic inequality through the Sustainable Development Goals by CESR examins the human rights issues at stake in SDG10 and offering a set of human rights-based policy proposals to ensure the promise of this goal is fulfilled. Building on CESR’s extensive experience in bringing human rights to bear in development debates, this briefing note explains why addressing the soaring levels of socioeconomic disparity that have come to characterize modern times is both a critical development challenge and a human rights imperative. 

From Disparity to Dignity argues that human rights principles such as non-discrimination, substantive equality and the deployment of ‘maximum available resources’ to realize rights progressively for all can provide normative guidance on how SDG10 should be implemented. The briefing note also underlines the urgency of coordinated action at the global level to tackle the structural factors fuelling inequality both within and between countries, such as cross-border tax abuse and democratic deficits in global economic governance.

It also tackles one of the most serious threats to SDG10 - the lack of robust systems of accountability to ensure progress. It argues that the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development has the potential to play an important role in monitoring the transnational dimensions of the SDGs and it analyzes the shortfalls of the current indicators proposed to measure progress towards SDG10 are addressed and more rigorous, human rights-sensitive measures are also suggested. 

Read the entire briefing note here.