A/HRC/43/45 widespread financial crises. 22 Regressive taxation and sluggish economic growth may diminish public revenue and lead to more reliance on external borrowing, which may eventually degenerate into a sovereign debt crisis. Empirical studies demonstrate that there is indeed a positive correlation between income inequality, fiscal deficit and sovereign debt.23 15. In turn, a rise in the income of the richest will also increase their savings, leading to a huge accumulation of private wealth. This increasing supply of capital requires more investment opportunities and consequently boosts the credit supply, even for riskier borrowers.24 16. It should be recalled that accurate and comprehensive global, regional or sometimes domestic data about household private debt are not entirely available. The IMF Global Debt Database25 is an important tool in this regard, offering a combination of available sources and information; it also shows, however, that data on private household debt are not yet available for many countries and/or for long and comparable periods. Many cases of informal (or even illegal) lending/borrowing at the individual and household levels are not registered, accounted for or adequately estimated. In certain countries the weight of the informal economy is huge, and a large part of private household debt is likely to be kept out of financial, banking and non-banking systems. Another part of household debt can be intertwined within larger estimates of illicit financial flows, such as all debt owed to migrant smugglers and transit debts owed to corrupt authorities at the border. Therefore, a purely quantitative approach to private debt and human rights would be highly unsatisfactory in contexts such as these. To be fair, such an approach remains largely out of reach without adequate data collection and analysis, and would offer only a partial insight into the complexities of individual and household debt from a human rights perspective. III. Household debt and human rights standards 17. The explosion of private household debt in many countries is the direct result of two parallel phenomena: of the State failing to abide by its human rights obligations, in particular in the field of economic, social and cultural rights, and social services being increasingly “financialized” or reduced to commodities. 18. The human rights framework is fundamentally based on the notion that States (and to some extent private actors) have obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights, ensuring equality and combating discrimination. All human beings are equal in dignity and rights is the flagship provision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 19. Financialization can in practice work as the antithesis of such a framework, as it rests on the idea of the individual’s responsibility to take appropriate steps to ensure an adequate standard of living and access to essential goods and services for themselves. Greater access to credit for all, understood as “financial inclusion”, is increasingly seen as a solutions to many human rights problems – whether to start a business to earn a living, to obtain appropriate health care or to have access to employment opportunities. In the 1990s, Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concept of microcredit, even argued that access to credit was a “basic human right for all”, 26 although no serious effort to explain its legal sources was made. Financialization highlights the power of financial markets and the notion of self-management in improving one’s own living conditions, obfuscating States’ obligations to take appropriate steps to progressively realize economic, social and cultural rights. 20. Debt is not per se a human rights problem, even less a violation. What raises concerns is when indebtedness is either caused by or causes human rights violations, affecting in 22 23 24 25 26 6 UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report 2017, p. 110. See A/HRC/31/60. Photis Lysandrou, “Global Inequality, Wealth Concentration and the Subprime Crisis: a Marxian Commodity Theory Analysis”, Development and Change, vol. 42, No. 1 (2011), p. 183. www.imf.org/external/datamapper/datasets/GDD. See John Gershman and Jonathan Morduch, “Credit is not a right”, Microfinance, Rights and Global Justice (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015), p. 14.