Every year when world powers gather in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum (WEF), the non-governmental organization Oxfam prepares a study on growing inequality in the world. Although this winter's meeting under the name "Davos agenda" will be virtual, critics from Oxfam are coming forward to discuss the trend of growing inequality in the world. Even during the corona virus pandemic, Oxfam activists do not miss the opportunity to point out the growing gap between extremely rich and extremely poor people and talk about the "inequality virus". As in previous years, the authors of the study calculated how the increased wealth of a few super-rich could alleviate the plight of a large number of socially vulnerable people. The current report states: "While the XNUMX richest people made up for the losses caused by the corona crisis in just nine months, the poorest will need more than a decade to recover from the economic consequences of the pandemic."
Affected poor and rich countries
What is new this year is that the increase in economic inequality occurred simultaneously in almost all countries, regardless of whether they are industrially developed, medium developed or developing countries. The authors of the study write that the richest have already coped with the corona crisis: "The capital of ten people who in December 2020 were the richest in the world, as of February 2019, despite the pandemic, increased by half a billion US dollars, to 1,12 billion dollars. "That money would be more than enough to vaccinate the entire world population against covid-19 and to ensure that no one becomes impoverished due to the pandemic," states the Oxfam study and warns that it is "the worst business crisis in the last 90 years, with hundreds of millions of people left without income or work". The list of the ten richest men in the world, according to Oxfam data, includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla director Elon Musk, major shareholder of the LVMH fashion concern Bernard Arnault and his family, as well as Bill Gates from Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle , legendary American investor Warren Buffett and Google co-founder Larry Page. The list also includes Zhong Shanshan from China, who got rich with bottled water Nongfu Spring and the head of the Indian concern Rilajans, Mukesh Ambani. At the top of Oxfam's list of the richest people in Germany are, as in previous years, the founder of Lidl, Dieter Schwartz, and major BMW shareholders, Suzane Klaten and Štefan Kvant.
Loss of trust
Oxfam activists talked to almost three hundred world economists and their analyzes are based on the statements of leading scientists who deal with the problem of inequality, such as the American economist Jeffrey Sachs, the Indian economist Jayati Ghosh and the French economist Gabriel Zachman, who teaches at the California University of Berkeley. The vast majority of surveyed experts, 87%, "expect as a result of the pandemic in their country an 'increase' or a 'sudden growth' of income inequality." And the World Bank warns that in 2030, due to the consequences of the pandemic, more people could live in poverty than in the time before the corona, says the Oxfam study.
In the meantime, the fear of the consequences of the widening gap between the rich and the poor reached the organizers of the WEF. They are particularly concerned about young people and warn that "a doubly destroyed generation is growing up in an age of lost opportunities." In the current report on global risks, the WEF also warns that the losers of the pandemic, primarily young people, are "losing confidence in today's economic and political institutions ".
And while WEF officials talk about setting new priorities, reforming systems, more digitization and greater international cooperation with the goal of overcoming the crisis, Oxfam's demands go much further. They want a paradigm shift, which would lead to the "democratization of the economy" and "stronger support for the poor and directing the economy towards the common good".
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