French economist Thomas Piketty has warned that the West Asia crisis and US President Donald Trump's tariff war could accelerate rising inequality trends and increase fossil-fuel extraction. According to reports from Business Standard, Piketty believes these developments are moving in the wrong direction but emphasizes that they will not succeed in the long term. He expects electors in the US to be unhappy by the end of the year, and believes world citizens are realizing that techno-nationalist models are not preparing the world to face environmental and social challenges. The latest Global Justice Report reveals that the share of wealth held by the world's poorest half could rise from 2% to 30% by 2100, while the billionaire class's share would fall from 6% to just 0.05%. Nearly 90% of the global population would see their incomes double while working roughly half as many hours as today. As per World Inequality Lab co-author Cornelia Mohren, the report concludes that "a habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible," emphasizing that what stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard work of building a coalition behind it.
The report suggests that India could overtake China around 2060, with Piketty projecting that India will reach ₹60,000 euros per capita in purchasing power parity by the end of the century. As reported by Business Standard, this target is part of a broader goal for all countries to achieve ₹5,000 euros per month by 2100. However, Piketty opposes the government's approach of providing tax incentives to foreign investors, stating that such policies are not promising avenues for addressing deeper structural economic problems facing the country. The proposed transition would be supported by a new Global Justice Fund mobilizing investments averaging 10.3% of global GDP annually between 2030 and 2060, funded through mechanisms including a global wealth tax, world sovereign wealth fund, and global income tax targeting the wealthiest individuals. According to Piketty, recent history shows these goals are plausible, citing countries like Sweden and Norway that once had extreme economic divisions but made rapid progress in reducing inequality through government policies and refocusing investment toward education and health.
According to the report, India will achieve complete convergence with rich countries by 2100, with almost complete convergence expected by 2080 and very advanced progress by 2060. As reported by Business Standard, this convergence requires growth in living standards comparable to East Asia's development between 1950 and 2025, involving significant investment in construction, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure. The projections assume that every Indian will reach living standards comparable to someone in the United States by 2100. The latest data shows that monthly GNI varies from €290 in Sub-Saharan Africa and €720 in South and South-East Asia to €4,590 in North America/Oceania, making India's proposed convergence to US per capita levels an enormous undertaking requiring targeted sufficiency strategies. The report takes three mid-century scenarios for decarbonisation outlined by the International Energy Agency and projects them to 2100, with the most ambitious plan keeping global temperature rises to 1.8°C by the end of the century - considerably lower than catastrophic 4°C to 4.5°C estimates under scenarios of slow decarbonisation.
According to the Global Justice Platform, the income scale within each country is projected to converge to a range of 1 to 5 over the 2026-2100 period. More precisely, the ratio between percentile thresholds P99.9 and P10 of the distribution of post-tax, posttransfer distribution of per capita net national disposable income is projected to converge to 4.5 in all countries, with an absolute maximum gap of 1 to 5. The P99/P10 ratio is projected to decline from about 37 today to 3.3 by 2100, which aligns with historical developments in Western and Nordic Europe during the 20th century, where this ratio declined from about 32 in 1900 to 3.9 in 1990. The P99.9/P10 ratio is projected to decline globally from about 130 today to about 4.5 by 2100, against a historical decline from about 150 to 11 in Nordic Europe during the 20th century. Country-level policies including progressive income and wealth taxation, minimum wage policies, pay scale regulations, labour market rules, co-determination and workers' representation on corporate boards are expected to play the leading role in reshaping domestic income distribution over the long run.
Piketty argues that extreme wealth concentration is a major climate challenge and advocates taxing the global rich to fund fair climate transition. The economist contends that the global rich, especially billionaires and multimillionaires from the North, bear disproportionate responsibility for climate damages, having benefited disproportionately from global economic growth and accumulating enormous GHG emissions since the Industrial Revolution. He emphasizes that future climate catastrophes and political pressures from the Global South will make such evolution impossible for today's rich countries to escape, with the US share of world GDP projected to fall from 40% in 1945 to only 5% by 2100. The report calls for broader democratization of the international economic system, with countries in Europe and North America/Oceania currently having four times more votes at the IMF and World Bank than their share of global population, while countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and South-East Asia have four times fewer votes than their population share. Piketty warns that without addressing inequality and planetary habitability together, governments risk repeating mistakes like the gilets jaunes protests in France against a carbon tax that would have hit working and middle-class people more than the rich.
