New Economy Working Group

We have worked on the issue of inequality for two decades. We host one of the leading web sites for facts, figures and analysis, www.inequality.org. Our annual Executive Excess report, now in its 18th year, garners major mainstream media coverage on the growing gap between CEO and worker pay. Recently, IPS was invited to give testimony on this research to the Senate Budget Committee.

However, Robin Broad from the American University and John Cavanagh from the Institute for Policy Studies warned on the Triple Crisis blog that the Bank's figures are "highly unreliable … and typically over-optimistic," as the 2010 estimates "are extrapolated from significantly smaller samples."

As Broad and Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies argue, the progressives of the world should have backed the best progressive candidate for the job of heading the World Bank rather than promoting Jeffrey Sachs' bid, on the simplistic basis that he represents the lesser of two evils. They highlight not only the consequences of Sachs' history of neoliberal shock therapy but also his present day "top-down and formulaic" approach to development.

"She wouldn't represent much of a change in the bank's general worldview, although the fact that she's a third-world woman would in itself constitute a major advance for the institution," said John Cavanagh, Global Economy director and former president of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Cavanagh said he preferred Ocampo as "someone who has challenged the neo-liberal paradigm that has dominated the bank for the past 30 years".