2011 Annual Task Force Conference Preview: Illicit Financial Flows and Inequality: A Human Rights Imperative

This post is part of our series from speakers at the Task Force’s 2011 annual conference, taking place in Paris October 6-7. For more information on the conference and to view live webcasts of the presentations in English and French, click here. You can also follow the conference on Twitter and submit questions for the presenters at #TFConf2011, or #TFConf2011fr for French.

Large inequalities, both of income and wealth, have been steadily rising since the 1970s and 80s. Today, the top 20 percent of the population holds 70 percent of the total income.

Inequality is far from a phenomenon confined to the boundaries of developing countries, as a survey in the U.S. showed recently. This latter finding should awaken us to two realities. One, inequality is not necessarily produced as a result of economies having limited resources. Second, the magnitude of the problem is not only of global, but also systemic, proportions. Yes, “systemic” is the same adjective one uses to talk about the threat represented by large banks that are “too big to fail.” There is no fault at all in applying the same term to refer to inequality. In fact, so systemic is it that International Monetary Fund researchers have developed models that show how widening inequality is bound to generate financial crises, a model that may well explain the recent 2008-09 severe crisis and, more importantly, why we are not out of it, yet.

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