Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations
is as much a deliberate policy as is a policy to orient investments towards certain sectors or to protect the domestic agricultural sector through price supports and import controls. Using the concepts of distribution and redistribution as a point of reference, the Forum identified three broad types of policies that have been pursued during the past few decades: policies that have disregarded distributional issues or deliberately created greater inequalities in pursuit of other objectives; policies aimed at maintaining or improving distributional patterns; and policies too weak to counter the various forces generating inequalities.
6.2.1 Policies directly responsible for increased inequalities Those countries, the most prominent of which was the United States, that gave the global political agenda its shape and orientations during the last quarter of the twentieth century pursued domestic policies that were essentially aimed at allowing economic forces free rein. The main components of such policies, varying from one country to another in terms of degree and emphasis, included the following: Tax restructuring. Tax systems became less progressive; there was a shift in emphasis from direct to indirect taxation, average income tax rates declined owing to cuts in the higher-income tax brackets, and corporate taxes and taxes on unearned income were reduced. Shifts in public expenditure. Particularly important in the present context was the reduction in the share of public funds allocated to social programmes such as unemployment compensation and old-age pensions, resulting in diminished public transfers to low-income households. Financial liberalization. Deregulation provoked a shift in the distribution of national income in favour of profits, revenues and rents derived from financial transactions, including speculative transactions. Shifts in the power and influence of different socio-economic groups and classes and targeted efforts to reduce the power and influence of trade unions. Action taken with regard to the latter had a number of consequences: workers were less able to challenge the decline in employment security linked to the growing tendency of employers to maintain a "flexible" labour force and thereby ensure market competitiveness; the right of workers to strike was effectively abolished; labour and minimum wage standards were disregarded in many contexts; and because it had become politically feasible, Governments and employers were able to substantially reduce the proportion of national income going to labour. Entrepreneurial and capitalist forces were unleashed in a number of regions with very different economic, social and political contexts; the countries of the