Imagine a school bus, no one’s standing, a couple of seats are empty up by the driver, otherwise it’s full. But instead of a buspass and half a Flump in their pockets, they have as much money as the world’s poorest half, 3.7bn people.
Billionaires have been created at a record rate of one every two days in the last year a report, released to coincide with the arrival of business and political elites in Davos for the World Economic Forum, by Oxfam says.
82 per cent of wealth generated last year across the world went to the richest one per cent of the global population.
Improved data has led to an upward revision of Oxfam’s annual estimate of how many people own the same as the poorest half of humanity, although the trend of widening inequality remains. Now, 42 people own the same wealth as the poorest 50 percent. In its latest Global Wealth Report Credit Suisse expanded its dataset. Using this new data, Oxfam now calculates that last year 61 people owned the same as half the world. As recently as 2009, the figure was 380.
The development charity said it was “unacceptable and unsustainable for our economies to continue to enable a super-rich minority to accumulate vast wealth while hundreds of millions of people struggle to survive on poverty pay.” It called for a rethink of legal and business models that prioritise shareholder returns over broader social impact.
Oxfam has previously identified the role of tax dodging in driving inequality. This year its report highlights how the excessive corporate influence on policy-making, erosion of workers’ rights and relentless drive to minimise costs in order to maximise returns to investors all contribute to a widening gap between the super-rich and the rest.
Billionaire wealth rose by an average of 13 percent a year between 2006 and 2015 – six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers. It takes just four days for a CEO of one of the world’s five biggest fashion retailers to earn as much as a Bangladeshi garment worker will earn in her entire lifetime.
Donald Trump listens to Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man who recently announced a net worth of $105bn (Credit: Chip Somodevilla)Mark Goldring, Oxfam GB Chief Executive, said: “Something is very wrong with a global economy that allows the one percent to enjoy the lion’s share of increases in wealth while the poorest half of humanity miss out. The concentration of extreme wealth at the top is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a system that is failing the millions of hard-working people on poverty wages who make our clothes and grow our food.
“The world has made huge strides forward in ending poverty but progress could be even faster if we did more to break down the barriers that are holding back the world’s poorest people. For work to be a genuine route out of poverty we need to ensure that ordinary workers receive a living wage and can insist on decent conditions, and that women are not discriminated against. If that means less for the already wealthy then that is a price that we – and they – should be willing to pay.
“Leaders should ensure that wealthy individuals and businesses pay their fair share of tax by cracking down on tax avoidance, and invest this into essential services like schools and hospitals, and creating jobs for young people.”
