# **1. Introduction**

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, social inequality around the world had reached staggering levels. Cuesta, Niño-Zarazúa, and Lopez-Noval (2022) estimate that more than 2.2 billion people worldwide were at risk of being excluded from a dignified life due to their circumstances, identity, or socioeconomic status in 2017. The numbers of the excluded more than tripled the extremely poor and doubled the multidimensionally poor (689 million and 1.45 billion, respectively; World Bank 2020 and Alkire and Robles 2017). Furthermore, the fallout from COVID-19 has reversed decades of poverty reduction (Valensisi 2020).

The pandemic caused 97 million people to fall into poverty in 2020, an annual increase without precedent since the Asian financial crisis of 1997 (World Bank 2021). The pandemic has increased inequalities within and between countries and further excluded marginalized groups from policy processes. For example, vaccination rates in poor countries are ten times lower than in rich countries (WHO 2021). A recent review concluded that “the poor, women, racialized minorities and other disadvantaged groups” have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic (Henson et al 2020:1341). Roelen et al (2020) argue that the stigma associated with COVID-19 contributes to a vicious circle of poverty, precarious and unstable living conditions, and vulnerabilities associated with ethnicity and origin, age, and gender. Poor people are more likely to test positive: for example, the COVID-19 mortality rate among Black Americans in 2020 was 2.4 times higher than among Whites in the US, and three times higher among indigenous peoples vs. non-indigenous people in Mexico (APM Research Lab 2020, Secretaria de Salud de Mexico 2021). Azevedo (2020) estimates that COVID-19 may increase the number of primary school age children either out of school or below the minimum proficiency level in reading from 382 million to 454 million worldwide. Reported cases of gender-based violence (which furthermore likely capture only a fraction of the actual number) have soared around the world since the start of the pandemic: including by 33 percent in Singapore, 30 percent in Cyprus and France, and 25 percent in Argentina (CARE 2020).

The universal yet unequal effects of the pandemic have renewed the focus among policy makers on poor countries and vulnerable populations after a prolonged period of sustained poverty reduction. COVID-19, revived outbreaks of civil conflict, and the increasingly severe manifestations of climate change have eroded previous optimism about “bending the arc of history” by ending poverty within a generation (World Bank 2013:12). The notion of “building back better” towards a sustainable, green and inclusive recovery has become a commonplace internationally (Balseca et al 2020, White House 2021). It remains to be seen, however, whether this heightened awareness is enough to turn the hitherto aspirational nature of social sustainability (embedded, for example, in the UN SDGs, UN 2015) into firm policy objectives.

As a starting point for a meaningful policy discussion on long-term social sustainability, we pose the following question: to what extent are poor countries less socially sustainable than rich countries? While the answer appears obvious—we would expect more socially sustainable countries to be wealthier ones—compelling empirical evidence is not abundant. In order to address this question, we need an operational definition of social sustainability. Unfortunately, there is neither an agreed definition of social sustainability nor consensus around how to measure it. To overcome this gap, this paper expands the literature in three ways. First, we review the 2