S. Subramanian

Sep 13 2026

Over the last decade or so, there has been increasing concern over the global concentration of income, and even more, of wealth.

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A recently-published paper in the journal The Lancet presents significant evidence on the excess mortality in ‘low-and-middle-income countries’ that could be triggered by the recent diminution of overseas development assistance from donor countries (not least the United States, in the wake of the effective dismantling of USAID), and estimates how modest taxation of the disproportionately massive wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny fraction of the world’s population could save many millions of lives in the immediate-to-near future.    

This article is a small gesture of support, aimed at advertising what I believe to be a significantly important paper by Gonzalo Barreix Sibils et al, recently published in the journal The Lancet, and titled ‘Wealth Redistribution Policies to Mitigate the Impact of Development Assistance Defunding: A Retrospective Evaluation and Forecasting up to 2030’. 

The article went online on September 7, 2026, and is authored by a set of 17 individuals (the number of co-authors testifying to the depth of data analysis and econometric rigour that characterise the content of the paper). The article, in my view, deserves the widest possible dissemination. It details facts about the extent of age-standardised and age-specific mortality in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs); the paucity of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) available to combat these orders of mortality and other aspects of deprivation; and the grotesque concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny section of humanity – wealth which, through minimal redistribution, has the potential to alleviate a substantial amount of undeserved and unfair global ill-being.

So what, one might ask, is new about this? The point, precisely, is: nothing. The issue is not about novelty, but rather the lack of it. The questions it should provoke are: why has the state of affairs mentioned at the end of the preceding paragraph had such a long innings? Why does it continue to be a valid description of the world in which we live? 

Also read: Inequality Is a Political Choice. A New Wealth Tracker Shows How India Could Do Better.

Among the things that all of us, as adults, know is that there is a great deal of deprivation in the world around us; that the amount of foreign aid available to address this deprivation is infinitesimally small; that the global burden of poverty, despite its large prevalence, is fairly negligible; and that actual aid transfers bear as little relation to recipients’ needs as to donors’ capabilities. Nearly 50 years ago, the Brandt Commission on International Development Issues recommended that the advanced countries set aside at least 0.7% of their GDP for overseas assistance – and this has turned out to be a counsel of perfection, honoured more in the breach than the observance.

If historical levels of foreign aid have been paltry, they have shrunk even further in more recent times. Reductions in overseas assistance have been a common occurrence in European countries such as Britain, France and Germany. The most dramatic and savage curtailment of aid happened during US President Donald Trump’s first month in office, in January 2025, when the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was more or less pulled down. These developments are all of a piece with the collective West’s increasingly blatant Israelophilia and Russophobia, as reflected also in a greater and greater general willingness to shed the fig leaf of claims to international justice and fairness.

Though the global North’s infusions of foreign aid, in relation to its capacity, have been small, the transfers have not been insignificant in relation to the South’s impoverished resource-base. The North’s present retreat into an even greater ungenerosity than in the past has certainly caused considerable hurt to the South. The capacity to hurt is particularly acute when transfers are small to begin with and can, further, be turned on and off (mainly off) at will: this is bound to be the case when the transfers are seen as a product of international philanthropy which, by its very nature, is voluntary and discretionary. For the transfers to be seen as mandatory would require acknowledging that there is a case for interpreting them as reparations for historical wrongs – ranging from colonialism to war to the imposition of indebtedness.

It is the possibility of mandatory transfers – as reflected in various tax and redistribution schemes – which the authors of The Lancet article explore. Over the last decade or so, there has been increasing concern over the global concentration of income, and even more, of wealth, as can be inferred from the work of economists such as Branko Milanovic, Anthony Atkinson, Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty. Simple statistics such as the income or wealth share of the richest 1% – or 0.1%, or even 0.01% – have become more and more alarming. These statistics signal not just the unfairness that one associates naturally with extremely unequal distributions of resources, but also the consequential concentration of political power they lead to, and a sense of the great deal of human misery and deprivation which could be avoided by minimalist schemes of redistribution. 

Also read: Why a Wealth Tax Is a Good Idea for India

Arising from which – and of course to the accompaniment of a great deal of opposition and resistance from the world’s affluent minority – various schemes of international taxation and transfer have in recent years begun to be investigated. These calls have not only come from professional economists writing learned papers, but have been translated into the setting up of specific international commissions with a mandate for recommending concrete arrangements for global tax coordination along lines of greater transparency and fairness than now obtained. An example of such an organisation is the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) (which is co-chaired, with Joseph Stiglitz, by Jayati Ghosh).

How, and to what extent, might a tax-cum-transfer system assist with alleviating an aspect of global deprivation? Here is a drastically simplified account of how the Lancet paper addresses this question. Among other things, the authors of the paper consider a set of 59 LMICs, and seek a quantitative relationship, for this set of countries, between mortality and the amount of ODA received. Using this relationship they make a forecast, for each of the five years from 2026 to 2030, of the reduction in the overall number of mortalities that could be achieved if ODA were in line with ‘business as usual’, as opposed to its present defunded status. They arrive at a cumulative five-year figure of 7.6 million mortalities: that is the number of lives that might be saved without the defunding in aid which the world now witnesses.

In the absence of ‘business as usual’ ODA, is there a system of taxes and transfers that might make up for the defunding? The Lancet article considers a number of tax schemes, how much revenue each of these schemes might be expected to generate, and how that would translate to lives saved. They consider, in turn, 10 specific taxes (the details for which the reader can find in the paper), conveniently listed in ascending order of the revenues they are expected to fetch, and therefore of the numbers of lives they are expected to save. 

Some of the results the authors arrive at are presented in tabular form below. What the figures in the table suggest is a range of tradeoffs: from 6.6 million lives over five years for 32.6 billion USD taxed off the world’s moneybags, to 29.5 million lives for 343.5 billion USD. Further comment is superfluous.

Ten tax schemes, estimates of their associated cumulated revenues, and estimates of their associated cumulated lives saved:

Item	Tax Scheme	Estimate of Cumulated Revenue (2026-2030)(Billions of USD)	Estimate of Cumulated Mortalities Averted (2026-2030)(Millions of Persons)
1	3% Crypto Tax on Top 10,000 Holders	32.6	6.6
2	An Interest Earnings Debt Tax (a waiver of all interest on debt owed by the LMICs to official creditors)	74	12.8
3	A 1% Tax on Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals (Billionaires)	90	15.1
4	An IMF2023 Crypto Tax	100	16.4
5	A Carbon Tax	102.2	16.6
6	An Interest Earnings Debt Tax (a waiver of 50% of interest on debt owed by the LMICs to official creditors and 25% of interest owed to private lenders)	120	17.7
7	A Corporate Tax	173.5	20.1
8	A 2% Tax un Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals (Billionaires)	217.5	23
9	A Tobin Tax	234	24.5
10	A 2% Tax un Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals (Billionaires)	343.5	29.5

Adapted from Table 4 in The Lancet paper

I should warn, as I have done earlier, that what I have provided is a drastically abbreviated and simplified version of the extraordinarily nuanced and painstaking econometric work that has gone into the making of the paper. But this should not prevent the interested scholar from reading the article in its entirety. 

The present note has been intended for the non-specialist reader, and its message is the simple one of the profoundly unfair international order within which the world’s inhabitants are obliged to conduct their lives. There are clearly also domestic lessons to be learnt from this. The wanton defunding of international aid has its parallel in policies of destructive domestic austerity with respect to social sector spending (read MGNREGA) as well as the reluctance to disturb the settled weight of interests of the very rich (read abolition of the wealth tax in India, and concessions in corporate taxes).

The Lancet paper is an important one, and I hope it will be widely read, not because it is even remotely of the type of work that is sufficient to usher in reform, but rather because I believe it is of the type of work that is necessary. 

It is essential, though it may be far from enough, for professionals to peg away relentlessly at the business of telling it as it is – even if what is said is obvious; indeed, especially when it is obvious, given our propensity to miss what is in plain sight, as in the celebrated case of Poe’s purloined letter.

S. Subramanian is a Chennai-based economist. This article went live on September thirteenth, two thousand twenty six, at fifty-four minutes past twelve at noon.

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