The Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) Index ranks 164 governments on their policies and commitments to fighting inequality in three areas – public services, tax and labour rights – proven to be pivotal to reducing inequality. Each country is scored equally on three pillars, and on three areas of action within these thematic pillars: 1. Policy commitment: how committed is the governments through their policy commitments? 2. Coverage or implementation: who is covered (or not) as a result of policy actions? How well does the government put policies on paper into practice? 3. Impact indicators: what is the impact of policy actions on inequality? The country gets an overall ranking on the CRI Index, as well as for each pillar. For detailed information, including how each pillar is calculated, the overall Index construction and data sources, read the 2024 methodology note.

The Index seeks to track the three core policy areas that are strongly correlated with reductions in inequality, as a proxy for a greater commitment by governments (successive CRII reports give an overview of the evidence which underpins the Index). The index does not seek to include everything that is relevant to fighting inequality, as that would be impossibly complex. It gives an indication of how well governments fight inequality, rather than a comprehensive assessment. This is very typical of indexes of this type. For example, the UN Human Development Index measures just three things (life expectancy, years of schooling and GNI per capita) to judge progress on human development.

We know that other policy actions are also vital to fight inequality are crucial – such as spending on social housing or climate adaptation, taxes on wealth, and equitable access to finance and land – and we write about them in the index reports and our other publications. But we cannot currently include them in the index because we lack data on them for a large number of countries, and lack sufficient funding for broadening the scope of the index to help compile such data. In future, we would very much like to expand the index to cover these issues, as well as to place even more emphasis on measures to reduce “horizontal” inequalities based on gender, ethnicity, age, disability and sexuality.

The index is painstakingly compiled by a team in DFI, through more than 6,000 data points taken from primary country budget documents and laws, or from secondary published sources from international organisations, and other sources of analysis and data such as the CEQ, ILO, IMF, OECD, UNESCO, WHO and World Bank. The data are then meticulously checked and quality controlled, firstly by DFI and then by Oxfam and partners at country level.

The data mostly refer to 2024 or 2023, though as the report states, some countries’ data on social services coverage and labour rights, are from older years. The CRII 2024 exposes a number of serious data gaps in the collection of data which are also essential for monitoring the SDGs, such as the impact of spending on education, health and social protection service coverage; the impact of public services and taxes on inequality; and the coverage and enforcement of labour rights. DFI and Oxfam call for these gaps to be urgently filled. For more details of data sources see the methodology document.

We do not intend the CRI to be promoting a set of “one size fits all” policies for all countries. Country political and economic circumstances will vary and so should policy details. But these are the immediate economic policy levers which have been shown by multiple studies to have the most immediate impact on reducing income inequality.

There is also no “ideal” level of inequality. All inequality will of course be likely to exacerbate poverty and growth or stagnation in inequality will prevent countries from eliminating extreme poverty. In addition, research by the IMF and UN has indicated that a Gini coefficient above of between 0.25 and 0.29 (out of 1, which would mean complete inequality ie all income in the hands of one household)) undermines growth and development. Only the Slovak Republic and Slovenia has reached this level, once again underlining the message that virtually every country could be doing a lot more.

Generally richer nations are nearer the top of the index (but some, like Singapore or the Gulf States, do much worse). Many of the rich countries near the top have had a history of social struggle where workers and women have fought successfully to improve their rights and force governments to introduce anti-inequality policies and, because they are wealthier, have more scope to raise income taxes and to spend these revenues on public services. They also have smaller informal sectors.

Lower income countries tend to be nearer the bottom. But some (such as the Kyrgyz Republic, Jordan and Lesotho) are doing well overall in the index, or on specific policy indicators, as we point out in the report. This is partly because they are poorer countries: it is harder to collect tax revenues from citizens with lower incomes, or to provide labour rights to citizens in non-contractual or informal jobs.

One clear characteristic which has emerged from all editions of the index is the poor performance of countries which have only recently emerged from, or are still affected by conflict. This is partly because such countries spend very high proportions of their budgets on defence, but also because in situations of conflict, it is very difficult to enforce policies of any kind.

The index ranks 164 of the 195 countries recognised by the United Nations. The remaining 31 countries have been excluded from the index because there are insufficient data or significant concerns about the quality of the available data. We make every effort to include all countries in the index but the extremely poor level of public data available for some countries limits this (notably in the Middle East).