UN report: Discrimination remains widespread as inequality gains stall
A United Nations report released July 7, 2026, finds measurable gains in income growth for poorer households but says progress toward a more equal world remains uneven and insufficient. The report was launched at the opening of the 2026 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, held from July 7 through July 15.
The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026 uses global and regional data from more than 50 international and regional organizations and covers more than 200 countries and territories. Its inequality assessment does not say every country is moving backward. Instead, it shows that improvements in some measures coexist with persistent relative poverty, widespread self-reported discrimination, a smaller share of economic output going to labor and rising refugee pressure.
Some poorer households are gaining faster than average
Among 112 countries with at least two comparable surveys since 2015, nearly 60% recorded faster income or consumption growth for the poorest 40% of residents than for the national average.
The finding is a qualified improvement, not evidence that inequality has been solved. It applies only to countries with comparable survey data. The UN reports that East and South-East Asia had the strongest performance, with 73% of countries recording inclusive growth, while Central and South Asia recorded 38%. Low-income countries were less likely to meet the inclusion target, and the regional averages do not describe every country equally.
Relative poverty remains widespread
The report uses a relative measure of poverty: living on less than half of a country’s median income. Across a broader sample of 109 countries, six in 10 countries reduced the share of people below that threshold since 2015.
A separate subsample of 93 countries with surveys from before and after the COVID-19 pandemic showed that the share living below half the median income fell by 1.4 percentage points to 13%. That 13% figure is not a universal global estimate; it describes the post-pandemic result in that specific subsample. The distinction matters because global averages can conceal sharply different national and regional trends.
Discrimination is common — and undercounted
Nearly one in five people globally reported experiencing discrimination during the previous 12 months. The result is based on self-reported experiences. People with disabilities reported discrimination at rates up to two or three times higher than the overall population. Women, poorer people and people with less education also reported higher rates.
The UN cautions that the scale is difficult to measure. Fewer than half of countries provide discrimination data broken down by income, education or migration status, and few countries conduct repeated surveys. Those gaps limit country comparisons, trend analysis and efforts to determine whether policies are reducing unequal treatment.
Workers are receiving a smaller share of output
Labor’s share of global GDP declined from 53.0% in 2015 to 52.6% in 2025. The change is small in percentage-point terms, but the UN says it can widen inequality because productivity gains tend to flow disproportionately to capital when labor receives a smaller share of economic output.
For workers and families, that can affect wage growth, bargaining power and household security even when economies expand. The UN notes that the steepest decline occurred in 2023 during the peak of post-pandemic inflation, while more recent data suggest a gradual recovery as real wages catch up with earlier price increases in parts of Europe and Northern America.
Displacement adds pressure
The share of the world’s population living as refugees, people in refugee-like situations or others needing international protection reached 444 per 100,000 people by mid-2025, more than double the 214 per 100,000 recorded in 2015.
This Goal 10 indicator is not a count of everyone who has been forcibly displaced. It includes people in the specified international-protection categories and excludes Palestine refugees under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. By the end of June 2025, 36.6 million refugees were under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, while 5.9 million Palestine refugees were under UNRWA’s mandate.
Rising displacement places additional demands on host communities, public services and humanitarian systems. It can also make social inclusion harder when people fleeing conflict face barriers to work, housing, education and legal protection. UNHCR’s more recent year-end 2025 figures show that forced displacement remained a global-scale pressure, although those figures cover a different reporting period and should not be substituted for the Goal 10 mid-2025 indicator.
Why the indicators matter together
Taken together, the measures show how different forms of inequality can reinforce one another. Poorer households may see faster income growth without escaping relative poverty. Discrimination can restrict access to jobs and services, especially for people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. A smaller labor share can limit the ability of workers to benefit from economic growth, while displacement can intensify pressure on already strained institutions.
The UN calls for stronger labor protections, redistributive policies, better disaggregated data, more development finance and action on the conflicts driving displacement. Those are recommendations, not adopted global policy, and the report itself does not change national law. The central question is whether governments and international institutions can turn measured gains into durable access to income, work, safety and services before the 2030 deadline.
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