TUAC has criticised the OECD’s new report on structural reforms, Foundations for Growth and Competitiveness 2026 (F4GC), for ignoring the interplay between demand, inequality and growth.
Published on 9 April, F4GC replaces the long-standing Going for Growth series (2007–2023, G4G) and aims to tackle the decades-long productivity slowdown across OECD and non-OECD countries by identifying key obstacles to growth and selecting the most effective productivity-enhancing reforms.
After the Global Financial Crisis, the OECD produced a number of flagship publications showing that inequality had risen across OECD countries since the 1980s, alongside the proliferation of low-quality, non-standard forms of employment; that this trend accelerated after the crisis; and that income inequality knocked 4.7% off cumulative growth in a subset of countries between 1990 and 2010. This evidence prompted the OECD in 2017 to include inequality in the Going for Growth framework – but the new publication excludes it entirely, reversing a decade of work to embed sustainability and inclusiveness in OECD economic policy.
The report’s calls for deregulation – including weaker employment protection, cuts to social contributions to reduce labour costs, and a shift from corporate income taxation toward more regressive consumption taxes – are the consequence of inattention to distributional outcomes, resting on the presumption that structural reforms will trickle down to workers, and that GDP expansion will automatically benefit all.
F4GC is not only a step backward from the OECD’s own pledge to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth, adopted by consensus in 2021 – it also contradicts the findings of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality, which concluded in November 2025 that inequality ranks among the most urgent global concerns, with the richest 1% capturing 41% of all new wealth between 2000 and 2024.
TUAC also contests the report’s exclusively supply-side diagnosis. Weak demand, driven by insufficient public investment and suppressed household incomes, is the fundamental cause of stagnating growth, yet the framework implicitly treats it as irrelevant. Higher wages and good quality jobs are essential to boosting the economic demand that drives investment and innovation.
Inequality undermines growth – years of the OECD's own research confirm it. Stripping that evidence from its flagship reform agenda, while inequality worsens globally, is a retreat to the supply-side thinking that failed before the financial crisis.
Read TUAC’s full analysis here.
