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Transforming economic systems

This pillar addresses the foundational rules, institutions, and power structures that shape how wealth is generated, distributed, and governed across the economy.

This pillar addresses the foundational rules, institutions, and power structures that shape how wealth is generated, distributed, and governed across the economy.

It focuses on transforming fiscal systems, monetary and financial governance, corporate regulation, industrial policy, and market institutions so that economic activity is aligned with human rights obligations, social justice, and ecological sustainability, rather than organised around the imperative of continuous growth.

The policies under this pillar are organised across several mutually reinforcing areas: establishing fair and effective fiscal systems that limit excessive wealth concentration and ensure corporations contribute their fair share; undertaking ecological fiscal reforms that align taxation with environmental responsibility; reorienting monetary policy and public finance toward social and ecological investment; strengthening democratic stewardship of strategic sectors and guiding private investment through industrial and credit policies; curbing financial speculation and rebalancing the role of private finance; addressing excessive market power through robust competition frameworks; and expanding the social and solidarity economy through supportive legal, financial, and procurement frameworks.

Together, these proposals seek to reshape how resources are mobilised and allocated, how investment decisions are made, and how economic power is distributed across society. By placing democratic priorities, equity, and long-term resilience at the centre of economic governance, this pillar aims to create the structural conditions necessary for poverty eradication within planetary boundaries, enabling economic systems to serve collective well-being rather than concentrated private interests.

FAIR AND EFFECTIVE FISCAL SYSTEMS

Limits to wealth accumulation

Unchecked accumulation at the top concentrates economic and political power, distorts democratic governance, and constrains the fiscal space needed to eradicate poverty. Establishing enforceable boundaries to wealth and income concentration is therefore not only a redistributive measure but a structural precondition for a human rights economy—one in which surplus resources are deliberately recirculated to support universal services, social protection, and ecological sustainability beyond growth.

1.1 Extreme wealth line

An extreme wealth line (EWL) functions as a governance benchmark: a policy-relevant reference point that enables governments to identify, assess, and respond to extreme wealth concentration as a systemic governance risk whose scale and effects warrant monitoring and policy action.

1.2 Wealth Tax

Wealth taxation encompasses a range of instruments — including taxes on capital income, taxes on wealth transfers (estate, inheritance and gift taxes), and recurrent taxes on the stock of wealth itself, such as net wealth taxes.

1.3 Inheritance and Gift Caps

In a post-growth framework, high inheritance taxation recirculates accumulated wealth into the public domain, strengthens democratic equality, and contributes to poverty eradication by ensuring that economic advantage is not permanently locked into family lineage but redistributed in support of collective wellbeing.

1.4 Maximum income schemes

In a human rights economy, maximum income schemes affirm that poverty eradication depends not on limitless upward accumulation, but on establishing fair and enforceable boundaries to income concentration within society.

Fair share from corporations

In an era of hyper-globalisation and financialisation, multinational corporations can shift profits across jurisdictions, extract crisis-driven rents, and monetise digital markets while contributing disproportionately little to the public finances of the countries where they operate. This erosion of the tax base weakens states’ capacity to fund health, education, social protection, and climate resilience, while shifting the burden onto workers and consumers. Ensuring a fair corporate contribution—through minimum effective taxation, windfall profit levies, and digital tax reform among others—is therefore central to restoring fiscal sovereignty, protecting vulnerable households, and rebalancing economic power between corporations and democratic institutions.

1.5 Minimum Corporate Tax

Without effective corporate taxation, poverty eradication becomes dependent on regressive taxation or perpetual GDP expansion.

1.6 Excess Profit Taxes

In a human rights economy, windfall taxation ensures that crisis-driven wealth is recirculated to protect livelihoods.

1.7 Digital Tax

By ensuring that the monetisation of user data and digital infrastructure contributes to the public purse, digital tax reform strengthens fiscal capacity for social protection, digital inclusion, and poverty reduction.

Ecological fiscal reform

Environmental externalities remain systematically underpriced in most tax systems. Emissions, resource extraction, and pollution costs are often excluded from market prices, allowing firms to externalise ecological damage onto communities and ecosystems. Low-income and marginalised groups are disproportionately exposed to air pollution, land degradation, and climate impacts, while bearing limited responsibility for their causes. The failure to internalise environmental harm both accelerates ecological breakdown and entrenches inequality.

1.8 Taxation of Resource Use and Environmental Harm

Taxation of resource use and environmental harm aligns fiscal systems with environmental justice by ensuring that those most responsible for pollution contribute proportionately to mitigation, adaptation, and remediation.

1.9 Luxury Carbon Taxation

Carbon taxation on luxury and non-essential consumption exempts goods and services essential to human well-being and channels revenue toward climate mitigation schemes and global climate justice.

MONETARY POLICY FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD

1.10 Central Bank Mandates for Social and Ecological Objectives

Aligning central bank mandates with social and ecological objectives recognises that price and financial stability cannot be safeguarded without addressing the destabilising effects of climate and inequality.

1.11 Public Monetary Financing for Social and Ecological Investment

When embedded in robust public investment management systems and sound macroeconomic governance, public monetary financing broadens fiscal space for poverty reduction, universal services, and climate resilience without excessive reliance on volatile private capital flows.

DEMOCRATIC INDUSTRIAL AND INVESTMENT POLICY

1.12 Favouring public, municipal and cooperative ownership of strategic assets in the low-carbon transition

Public, municipal and cooperative ownership should be prioritized in the development of strategic low-carbon assets.

1.13 Binding Credit Steering of Private Investment

By redirecting finance away from environmentally destructive and socially unnecessary activities and toward essential provisioning, binding credit steering helps realign production with social needs and ecological limits.

1.14 Public Spending for Social and Ecological Priorities

Redirecting public expenditure away from harmful subsidies toward social and ecological priorities is a central lever for poverty eradication and structural transformation.

CURBING FINANCIAL SPECULATION

1.15 Reorienting Financial Regulation

Financial regulation should be an active instrument for reorienting private for-profit finance toward socially useful and ecologically sustainable ends, rather than a narrow toolkit confined to competition, consumer protection, and crisis prevention.

1.16 Nationalisation of Pension Funds

This policy calls for nationalising or establishing control over pension funds, and re-centring pension systems around a flat-rate residency-based Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) state pension.

COMBATING MARKET POWER

1.17 Competition Policy as Countervailing Power

This proposal aims to shift the focus of anti-monopoly initiatives toward reconfiguring the legal and financial architectures that, by design, concentrate market power in the hands of a few.

TRANSITIONING TO A SOCIAL AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMY

1.18 Supporting Purpose-Driven and Mission-Oriented Enterprises

This policy proposes measures for companies to adopt broader stakeholder governance, meaning giving employees, communities and others a say in how the organization is run.

1.19 Institutional Frameworks for Social and Solidarity Economies

The policy proposes an institutional ecosystem to support the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), which is the only existing economic system whose internal logic concretely prefigures a shift from capital-centred to human-rights-centred economic activity.

1.20 Cooperative and Public Infrastructure for the Social and Solidarity Economy

This proposal calls for building a public and cooperative solidarity-finance infrastructure that treats credit not as a commodity but as a lever for endogenous territorial development.

1.21 Intergenerational Public Procurement

Intergenerational procurement can be a strategic tool for redistribution, democratic accountability and long-term resilience, advancing poverty eradication through deliberate public investment choices rather than market competition alone.