The 2026 World Bank–IMF Spring Meetings closed in Washington with one quiet headline: hidden debt is now firmly on the agenda. The World Bank used the gathering to launch a creditor-debtor reconciliation exercise aimed at unmasking liabilities that countries have not disclosed. The trigger was Senegal, where the IMF suspended a $1.8 billion programme in 2024 after roughly $13 billion in unreported debt came to light.
Greater transparency on what countries owe is welcome. But the meetings, once again, said almost nothing about what countries are worth. And as the founding committee of the new International Panel on Inequality gathered in Johannesburg later in April, the silence was harder to ignore. If the Bretton Woods institutions can mobilize to detect hidden debt, why do they continue to ignore hidden assets — and the people whose unmeasured labour, resources and futures sit on the positive side of the ledger?
National accounts were designed for an industrializing economy. They count what is felled, mined, manufactured and traded. They ignore much of what now defines wealth. Sunlight, wind and ocean currents — abundant in many of the world’s poorest countries (for example, the windiest place on earth is near Lake Turkana in Kenya) – are both national assets and possibly global commons. Global commons, such as the high seas and outer space resources, are similarly invisible. And energy generation resources, while quantifiable, still barely appear on any balance sheet. The same is true for the future of work and the youth bulge; as well as the informal economy (accounting for more than 80 per cent of employment in sub-Saharan Africa) and unpaid care work – overwhelmingly done by women — that the ILO values at around $11 trillion a year (or 9 per cent of global GDP).
Some progress has been made. In March 2025 the UN Statistical Commission adopted the 2025 System of National Accounts, which for the first time treats the depletion of natural resources as a cost of production, recognizes renewable energy resources as economic assets, and includes data as an asset. But, while this is a serious step, it’s a foothold, not a vantage point. The new framework still struggles to value a living coral reef, a whale that has not been hunted, the air a city breathes or the productive capacity of a young, well-educated population. And it does not yet ask how to record sovereign holdings of digital assets, or how to credit a country for the renewable electrons it sends across borders.
These omissions are not technical curiosities. They shape what creditors lend on, what credit-rating agencies score, what the IMF deems sustainable, and what governments feel free to spend. A country whose coastline regulates regional climate, whose forests sequester carbon for the planet and whose women provide the unpaid scaffolding of the domestic, and at times global economy, is on paper, poor. As a result, it’s forced to borrow expensively against its narrowly defined assets and then service that debt by cutting the very public goods (i.e. health or education) that produce the unmeasured ones. And is told to do so in the name of fiscal discipline. The architecture insists on precision about debt while tolerating imprecision about wealth. The asymmetry is not neutral.
This is why the work of the new International Panel on Inequality matters beyond income statistics. The G20-commissioned report that proposed the panel found that the richest 1 per cent have captured 41 per cent of new wealth since 2000. That figure is a symptom. The cause runs deeper: a measurement system that treats some assets as real and others as invisible, and a financial architecture that lends, conditions and judges accordingly.
A serious reform of the international financial architecture requires both halves of the balance sheet. Hidden debt must be exposed. Hidden assets must be acknowledged, counted, measured, valued and respected. Until they are, the system will keep solving for the wrong equation — and the people on the wrong side of it will keep paying.
