Samikhsya Bureau
The fortune of billionaires increased by 12 percent last year – or $2.5 billion a day – while the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity saw their wealth decline by 11 percent, a new report from Oxfam said on Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland.
Oxfam, founded in 1942, is a confederation of 20 independent charitable organisations focusing on alleviating global poverty. It brings out its report on unequal wealth distribution every year on the eve of WEF.
According to the Oxfam report, the trends of increasing divide between the rich and poor are more or less uniform across most countries of the world including India.
The wealth of the top 1 percent rich Indians grew by 39 percent, while that of the bottom 50 percent grew by just 3 percent in 2018, the report said. The Indian billionaires witnessed their wealth grow by Rs.2,200 crore in 2018. “Rising wealth inequality threatens the social fabric of the nation,” it said.
The increasing gap between the rich and poor has undermined the fight against poverty damaging economies and triggering public anger across the globe. Women and children are the worst sufferers of such economic inequality. This has occurred as the governments have been under-taxing corporations and the rich while underfunding welfare measures like healthcare and education.
At least 10,000 people die every day due to lack of access to affordable healthcare, the report says. In developing countries, a child from a poor family is twice as likely to die before the age of five as a child from a rich family. In countries like Kenya a child from a rich family will spend twice as long in education as one from a poor family.
On the other hand, the report says, poor women and girls suffer most when public services are neglected. Girls are pulled out of school, first when the money is not available to pay fees, and women clock up hours of unpaid work looking after sick relatives when healthcare systems fail. Oxfam estimates that if all the unpaid care work carried out by women across the globe was done by a single company it would have an annual turnover of $10 trillion – 43 times that of Apple, the world’s biggest company.
“The report reveals that the number of billionaires has almost doubled since the financial crisis, with a new billionaire created every two days between 2017 and 2018, yet wealthy individuals and corporations are paying lower rates of tax than they have in decades. Getting the richest 1 percent to pay just 0.5 percent extra tax on their wealth could raise more money than it would cost to educate the 262 million children out of school and provide healthcare that would save the lives of 3.3 million people,” said Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International.
Last year’s Oxfam report had estimated that the richest 1 percent people of the world owned 82 percent of the wealth created, while the poorest half – 3.7 billion – people saw no increase in their wealth. In India, as per the last year’s report, the 1 percent richest controlled 73 percent of the wealth created in the country.
