Insights on Living Wage from the Research of IPSP -27-Oct-Opening remarks, Ravi Kanbur

How can we better understand the dynamics of living wages worldwide and their impact on our economies and societies? The International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP), in collaboration with the OECD WISE Centre, is addressing this question through new research on how living wages affect poverty, income distribution, productivity, and informality. This research also explores the enablers and barriers to implementing living wages, examining how public and corporate policies can align to raise wages and support informal workers where economic conditions allow. This webinar presented preliminary research findings and discussing how they can inform policy initiatives across OECD countries.

1. Living Wage Working Group of
International Panel on Social
Progress (IPSP)
Ravi Kanbur
www.kanbur.dyson.cornell.edu
Presentation at OECD
27 October,2025

2. •IPSP, www.ipsp.org
•What is it?
•How does it work?
•Living Wage Working Group of IPSP.

3. What is it?

4. •IPSP is a multi-disciplinary collaborative of thinkers and doers
working to advance social progress.
•Since its founding in 2014, IPSP has created a distinctive space
forlong-term,systemic thinking about social progress.
•In 2018, more than 350 social scientists from across disciplines
and regions came together to produce a landmark report,
Rethinking Society for the 21
st
Century.

5. Rethinking Society for the 21
st
Century
First Report of the International Panel on
Social Progress

6. •IPSP is now in a second phase, IPSP2, where the thinking
embodied in IPSP1 is being extended and applied to specific
issues, focusing on action and on building coalitions to
advance progress.

7. How does it work?

8. •High Level Honorary Committee, including:
•Amartya Sen, Mohammed Yunus, Michele Bachelet, Amadou Makhtar
Ba, Sheila Jasanaoff, Carlos Lopes, Edgar Morin, Mustapha Nabli,
Helga Nowotny, Vera Songwe, Luis Guillermo Solis Rivera.
•Advisory Board of more than 70 senior thinkers and doers, Co-Chaired
by Elisa Reis and Ravi Kanbur.
•Executive Board, Chaired by Marc Fleurbaey.
•Several hundred contributors: scholars, international organizations
experts, civil society actors, social entrepreneurs, private sector
leaders, etc.

9. •Thirteen Working Groups, the beating heart of IPSP2.
•These include:
•Measuring What We Value: Beyond GDP
•Information as a public good in the age of social media and artificial
intelligence.
•Steering technological change –democratically.
•Ecological rule of law.
•LIVING WAGE

10. •Today is a special day for IPSP, and this week is a special week for
IPSP.
•Today is the first day of the Global Social Progress Week, with a
series of in person, online and hybrid events (around 30) all
around the world.
•https://ipsp.org/global-social-progress-week/
•This event here at OECD on the Living Wage is one of the first of
those events

11. Living Wage

12. The broad conception of a Living Wage as set out by the ILO is
“….the wage level that is necessary to afford a decent standard of living for
workers and their families, taking into account the country circumstances and
calculated for the work performed during the normal hours of work.”
At the same time, it is recognized that:
“Living wages should not be a one-size-fits-all approach and should reflect
local or regional differences within countries,” and a sustainable strategy to
promote living wages, “should go beyond the realm of wage-setting
mechanisms alone and include a broader consideration of factors.”

13. •Members of the Living Wage Working Group come from academia,
international organizations, civil society, trade unions and the
private sector.
•The coordinators of the Living Wage are Romina Boarini and Ravi
Kanbur.
•We have met regularly to first define and then progress a work
program that goes beyond analysis to policy and implementation.

14. •Even though it is specific in terms of IPSP’s broad perspective,
Living Wage is itself a vast and sprawling area of policy interest.
•Given our assessment of both the value added of specific types of
engagement, and the ability of the group to deliver value added
given competencies and availabilities, we are focusing on three
areas on which we will produce policy briefs as the start of the
process.

15. •The broad macroeconomic case for a Living Wage focusing on
employment, poverty and inflation (Carlotta Balestra).
•Implementation of Living Wage from a private sector and corporate
perspective. (Matteo Squire).
•Informality and Living Wage (Ravi Kanbur).

16. •Thank You!