Global Inequalities and the Social Protection Floor

Global inequality is measured in several ways, but the headline data is consistent and severe. According to Oxfam’s Inequality Inc. report (2024), the richest 1% of the world’s population owns 43% of all global financial assets. The wealth of the world’s five richest individuals more than doubled since 2020, during the same period in which nearly five billion people globally became poorer. In 2024, the world’s billionaires increased their wealth by approximately $2 trillion. Meanwhile, 44% of the world’s population lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of $6.85 per day (Oxfam, 2025). The bottom 50% of the world’s households hold just 25% of total global income, while the top 10% hold 30% (ILO, 2024).

Inequality is not only a matter of individual income. It is structural and geographical. The Global North holds 69% of global private wealth and 74% of all billionaire wealth (Oxfam, 2024). Oxfam estimates that between 1995 and 2015, $242 trillion was extracted from the Global South by multinational corporations and wealthy nations through supply chains, resource extraction, and tax abuse. Lower-income countries lose approximately $47 billion per year through global tax abuse, equivalent to 49% of their public health budgets (Oxfam, 2025). These structural inequalities are embedded in the systems of trade, investment, and supply chain management that organisations in every sector participate in.

The Social Protection Floor is the international community’s primary framework for addressing the most acute consequences of this inequality. The ILO Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202), adopted by near-unanimous tripartite consensus of governments, employers, and worker delegates of 185 ILO member states, defines the social protection floor as nationally defined sets of basic social security guarantees which secure protection aimed at preventing or alleviating poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion. The Recommendation specifies that every national social protection floor should comprise at minimum four guarantees over the life cycle: access to essential healthcare including maternity care; basic income security for children providing access to nutrition, education, and care; basic income security for persons of working age who are unable to earn sufficient income due to sickness, unemployment, maternity, or disability; and basic income security for older persons (ILO, 2012).

The scale of the gap between the social protection floor as a standard and the reality on the ground is significant. As of 2024, 47.6% of the global population was not covered by any social protection scheme (ILO, 2024). To extend at least a social protection floor to all low/middle income countries would require an additional investment of $1.4 trillion per year, equivalent to 3.3% of the aggregate GDP of those countries (ILO, 2024). Africa faces the largest financing gap: social protection expenditure on the continent averages just 5.9% of GDP, compared to a global average of 12.9% (ILO, 2024). The ILO’s World Social Protection Report 2024 - 26 explicitly connects the social protection gap to climate change, noting that the communities least able to access social protection are disproportionately exposed to the physical impacts of climate change and least equipped to adapt.

Social governance agendas are the legislative and policy frameworks that translate the reality of global inequality into specific obligations for organisations. In the UK, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires every business with a turnover of £36 million or more to publish an annual statement setting out the steps it has taken to prevent slavery and human trafficking in its operations and supply chains. At the EU level, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) requires large companies to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for actual and potential adverse human rights and environmental impacts across their entire value chains. Gender pay gap reporting, living wage commitments, supply chain labour standards auditing and access to grievance mechanisms are further examples of social governance agendas that organisations are increasingly expected to meet. These agendas do not exist in isolation from the inequality data presented above. They are the direct institutional response to the structural conditions that allow poverty, exploitation, and inadequate social protection to persist in global supply chains.

For CR&S practitioners, these facts have direct operational relevance across three interconnected areas:

• Supply chain exposure: organisations sourcing from regions with weak or absent social protection systems are operating in environments where workers face existential risks. This creates direct exposure to risks regarding human rights and labour standards, which is increasingly regulated through legislation.
• Social governance agendas: inequality is a material issue for ESG disclosure. The social pillar of frameworks such as GRI, CSRD and ISSB requires organisations to assess and report on their impacts on people across their value chains, including in regions where social protection is absent or inadequate. 
• Stakeholder expectations: employees, investors, and civil society are increasingly focused on whether organisations are contributing to or exacerbating inequality through their supply chain practices, tax conduct, pay ratios, and community investment.

Understanding global inequalities and the social protection floor is a practical tool for assessing the social dimension of ESG risk in your industry, understanding the regulatory agendas that follow from it, and identifying where your organisation’s activities intersect with the structural conditions that drive inequality and social protection gaps across the world.