The Fundació Catalunya Europa, within the framework of the Re-City program, has organized the seminar "Inequalities in metropolises, a global comparison" with the aim of presenting and debating the first results of the homonymous study that is being carried out. finalizing from the Foundation.

Xavier Ramos, professor of applied economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and adviser to the challenge "Combating inequalities" and the authors of the study, Marc Tataret, Rubén García and Júlia Mumany, all researchers at the Catalonia Europe Foundation.

“The debate over inequalities is on the table,” Ramos said. The scholar has stressed that the debate on inequalities is not just an ethical or moral debate, but has repercussions on a day-to-day basis, even among the most disadvantaged people living in highly unequal environments. And it is that our subjective well-being and our health get worse when we live in more unequal environments.

Public policies, therefore, have a key role to play in reversing, or at least mitigating, inequalities. For them to be effective, however, it is essential to study their redistributive impact from data, especially scarce when we talk about cities, despite the fact that more and more efforts are being made. The study therefore examines the relationship between income inequality and variables that may be the result of this inequality in a comparison between 30 major world metropolises on all continents (with the exception of Oceania).

The study authors conclude that there is a direct correlation between inequality and unemployment rate, between inequality and life expectancy (less inequality, more life expectancy) and between inequality and homicide rate. They also indicate that voting for xenophobic and populist parties could be directly related to the level of inequality, in other words, more inequalities means more populist voting.

In this global comparison, the AMB obtains good results and consolidates itself as one of the metropolises with the least inequality - in relation to the 30 studied - and has lower levels of homicide rate and xenophobic vote, while being one of the metropolis with a higher life expectancy.