#un-socioeconomic-pathways

#un-socioeconomic-pathways

Experts emphasize that by cherrypicking the best aspects of savings and investment schemes abroad, Ireland can learn what works best in its own financial context.

"I have always rejected attempts to create an artificial divide between rural Ireland and urban Ireland - to play one off against the other - east v west, Dublin v the rest. We are one nation, and few Dubs are more than a generation or two away from rural Ireland."

Britain's tax wedge, which estimates total taxes on labour paid by employees and employers, minus cash benefits received by working households, increased by 2.45 percentage points last year, the most in the OECD.

Statistics Canada reported that the income gap measuring the difference in disposable income between the top 40 percent and bottom 40 percent reached 46.7 percentage points in 2025, up from 46.4 percentage points the previous year.

The World Bank's recent report argues that government intervention, when done right, can actually be an essential ingredient of economic success, reversing decades of opposition to industrial policy.

The report contends that the lower rungs of the middle class shrank because more Americans got richer, with 31% of families classified as upper middle class in 2024.

Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district.

Growing up outside Manchester, I remember watching my mum count out exact change at the supermarket checkout, keeping a running total in her head as she shopped. Meanwhile, my university roommate would just toss things in his trolley without a second thought. That's when it hit me: Financial security isn't just about having money. It's about the mental space that money creates.

In places where inclusion is part of the infrastructure of their economy-supply chains, procurement processes, capital access, or business ownership-people thrive. Inclusive economies create more resilience by expanding the base of potential business owners who can build, own, innovate, and hire. They allow more opportunities for homeownership and investing in the longevity of communities. As our economy becomes increasingly stratified and volatile, we need as much resiliency as we can get.

In the echoing expanse of a Sunnyvale food bank, Silicon Valley leaders scrambled across a warehouse floor, making a dull cacophony as they ran to different tables where they begged for work, bargained for groceries, sought housing, and bailed their loved ones out of jail. The desperate group of business leaders and public workers hadn't suddenly fallen on hard times, rather each was playing a role as part of a poverty simulation

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco is not a radical leftist institution, and its research economists are not Nimbys, or socialists, or anything other than classically trained academics who look at data. So it's interesting that two Federal Reserve researchers have just published a paper that adds to the clear evidence that "constraints" on the supply of private-market housing have little to do with the lack of affordability in cities like San Francisco.