The gap between a small number of the richest people in the world and the vast majority of the poor has rapidly deepened since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and the world is entering a decade of increasing differences in the distribution of wealth, the Oxfam organization announced today, in its annual analysis of global inequality.
In a report published before the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Oxfam, whose goal is to eradicate poverty, estimated that in the next decade the world could get its first billionaire, i.e. a super-rich person whose fortune exceeds 1.000 billion dollars, the agencies reported.
"Billionaires are getting richer, the working class is struggling, and the poor are living in despair. This is the unfortunate present of the world economy," US Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in the foreword to the report.
Senders assessed that there had never been such an inequality in income and wealth, and that today "greed, arrogance and irresponsibility are unprecedented".
"We have the top five billionaires, who have doubled their wealth. On the other hand, almost five billion people have become poorer," said Amitabh Behar, executive director of the Oxfam organization, founded in 1942 in Oxford, which was founded in 1995, at the opening of the meeting in Davos. grew into an alliance of humanitarian organizations from all over the world.
Oxfam specified that those five people - Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Warren Buffett - have doubled their wealth since 2020.
Behar predicted that the world will get its first billionaire within the next ten years at the latest, and that, according to Oxfam's estimates, it will take more than 200 years to fight poverty.
A person who crosses that limit, and it is possible that it will be someone who is not currently on the list of the richest people, will have the same "weight" in the financial sense as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, said Behar.
At the moment, according to Oxfam, which relies on the Forbes list of the richest people, the richest man in the world is Elon Musk with assets worth about 250 billion dollars.
Oxfam said that the Forbes list shows that the total wealth of the five richest billionaires in November 2023 was 869 billion dollars, which is a nominal 155 percent more than in March 2020, when it was 340 billion. Realistically, that increase was 114 percent.
According to Oxfam's calculations, those five super-rich earned an average of $2020 million every hour as of 14.
On the other hand, 4,77 billion people became poorer and lost a total of about 2020 billion dollars from 20, while the enormous price increases of energy and food, due to the war in Ukraine, disproportionately affected precisely the poorest countries.
The wages of 791 million workers as of 2020 have not kept pace with inflation, Oxfam has calculated.
The measures that Oxfam suggests against such inequality are constant taxation of the rich in every country, effective taxation of large corporations and the fight against tax evasion. The funds that would be collected should be invested in climate protection, education, health and social protection.
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