The 1% of billionaires on the planet have twice as much wealth as the remaining 99% of people, according to the Oxfam Intermon report, presented on the occasion of the Davos Forum, in which the alternative of “taxing big corporations and the super-rich as the exit door from superimposed crises” that crosses the world.
During the last decade, “the richest 1 percent had captured about half of all the new wealth,” as can be seen from the Survival of the Richest report, which was published on the opening day of the World Economic Forum, in the city of Davos with an agenda impregnated by the continuity of the war in Ukraine and the global slowdown and inflation.
The world’s elites are gathering – in what is the first reunion in the post-Covid-era snow – at the Swiss ski resort as extreme wealth and extreme poverty have risen simultaneously for the first time in 25 years.
The Argentine government decided to stay out of this face-to-face edition, while the Brazilian government sent the Minister of Economy, Fernando Haddad.
The event will also feature the President of the European Union Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the United States’ climate envoy, John Kerry, and the new presidents of South Korea, Colombia, and the Philippines.
Chinese Vice Premier Liu He will be at the meeting on Tuesday, a day before his first meeting with his US counterpart, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, in Zurich, who confirmed that she will not be in Davos this time around.
Entire countries are facing bankruptcy, and the poorest countries now spend four times as much paying off debts to wealthy creditors as they do on health care.
Nor will US President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron.
As for Ukraine, Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska will speak from Davos on Tuesday, while her husband President Volodimir Zelenskywill give a remote speech on Wednesday.
As for the report’s findings, “while ordinary people make daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have exceeded even their wildest dreams. Just two years later, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for the billionaires: a great 1920s boom for the world’s richest,” said Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International.
“Taxing big corporations and the super-rich is the way out of today’s overlapping crises, it’s time to demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the very rich result in their wealth somehow leaking out to everyone else,” he added.
During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the top 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world together.
The fortunes of billionaires have risen by $2.7 billion a day, the report said. This adds to a decade of record gains: the number and wealth of billionaires have doubled in the last ten years.
Billion-dollar wealth increased in 2022 with rapidly increasing food and energy gains. The report shows that 95 food and energy corporations have more than doubled their profits by 2022.
These sectors made $306 billion in windfall profits and paid out $257 billion (84 percent) of that to wealthy shareholders.
For instance, the Walton dynasty, which owns half of Walmart, received $8.5 billion in the past year. Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, owner of major energy corporations, has seen this wealth grow by $42 billion (46 percent) in 2022 alone.
At the same time, at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation outpaces wages, and more than 820 million people, roughly one in ten people on Earth, go hungry.
Women and girls often eat the least and make up almost 60% of the world’s hungry population. Meanwhile, the World Bank says we are likely seeing the largest increase in global inequality and poverty since World War II.
Entire countries are facing bankruptcy, and the poorest countries now spend four times as much paying off debts to wealthy creditors as they do on health care.According to the report.
Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a “real tax rate” of around 3 percent between 2014 and 2018.
Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, earns $80 a month and pays a 40 percent tax rate, the report contrasts.
India’s richest 1% now owns more than 40% of the country’s total wealth, while the poorest half of the population accounts for just 3%, according to Survival of The Richest, the annual study on inequality.
Depending on the job, India’s billionaires grew from 102 to 166 in 2020 and, since the start of the pandemic in November 2022, have seen their wealth increase by 121% every day.
During 2022, the wealth of Gautam Adani, the richest billionaire in India and the second richest man in the world, grew by 46%, while the total property of the 100 richest reached 660,000 million dollars, among others examples.
Finally, regarding the event itself, the experts pointed out that it coincides with the overlapping of several crises that have not been fully resolved: the war in Ukraine, the increase in the cost of living, food insecurity, of course, the climate crisis. and the new threat of new variants of Covid-19.
