NEW YORK, October 16, 2026 – The world is speeding up fast. Digital transformation of economies continues to happen fast. There’s rapid advancement in clean energy. Artificial Intelligence is changing the face of work everywhere.
However, the latest report from the United Nations highlights that those least capable of adapting to the speed of development become even more left behind. Moreover, the cost of exclusion only increases.
According to the World Social Report 2026: The New Economics of Social Inclusion: Making Transformations Work for All, published by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs on October 15, social inclusion is a productive investment and not just a humanitarian endeavor. The cost of its exclusion leads to slower growth and reduced resilience. It may also affect the trust of citizens towards the government.
The statistics are hard to ignore. In 2025, 58 percent of the global workforce was informally employed without any contracts and social protection. In the group of girls and young women aged 15 to 24 years, 27 percent were neither working nor studying. Additionally, there has been a growing gap in income inequality within more than 50 countries, including 23 high-income ones, from 2000 to 2024.
Around 2.2 billion people – or 26 percent of the world’s population – were not connected to the internet in 2025. But even connection is not always enough. High costs of data, low-quality connections, and lack of digital skills continue to prevent people from participating in education, work, and public services.
Here’s the practical problem.
Without a reliable broadband connection, a person can’t easily apply for a remote job, fill out an online form to receive social benefits, or acquire skills related to AI. The report cautions that uneven access to connectivity, devices, data, and AI skills may result in further deepening of existing digital divides. With the growing tendency of governments to move public services online in order to save money and increase efficiency, people lacking devices, digital confidence, and affordable data become automatically excluded.
Climate pressure makes this divide even harsher. Of the 1.1 billion people living in multidimensional poverty, 887 million face at least one major climate hazard. Those with the fewest resources to adapt suffer the greatest losses. A single flood, drought, or heat wave can destroy a livelihood, interrupt schooling, and push a struggling household into deeper hardship.
So what happens if governments delay action?
And the report gives a sober assessment that nations which delay investments in social protection programs for ten years could forego a 12 percent gain in their economic production over nations which made early investments. Delaying is costly. Extremely costly.
Inclusion creates a wider pool of workers, develops human resources, spurs innovation, and ensures that productive growth is widely felt. Exclusion does the exact opposite. It squanders human resources and makes an economy weak.
However, growth is not sufficient by itself. Using data from 168 countries and 25 years, UN DESA has developed a Socially Inclusive Transformation dashboard that measures how much of economic, digital, and energy transformations benefit everyone. Malta, Ireland, and Denmark scored the highest in terms of overall scores. However, none of the top five nations in terms of economic transformation—Malta, Ireland, the United States, Singapore, and China—were in the top five in terms of inclusion, where Belgium, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Sweden took the lead positions.
To address this, the UN identifies four priority areas: expanding access to education, AI skills, and social protection; universal connectivity and access to renewable energy; labor markets with quality jobs and portable benefits; and the sharing of prosperity through progressive taxation and collective bargaining.
In developing countries, this difficulty is further complicated by the problem of high debt and declining development assistance. Fiscal space, debt relief, and technology access become crucial here.
The transformations can’t be avoided. The exclusion should never happen. For the 2.2 billion people who are yet to come online, the distinction is not theoretical—it’s the difference between becoming a part of the next economy or being left behind.
