Just eight of the world’s richest men have more wealth than the poorest half of the global population – some 3.6 billion people, according to a new analysis from Oxfam.
A briefing paper from Oxfam, An economy for the 99%, says that while since 2015, the world’s richest one per cent of people have owned more wealth than the rest of the planet, new calculations based Forbes listings and data from Credit Suisse show that eight men now possess as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.
The report also shows that over the next 20 years, just 500 people around the world will hand more than $US2.1 trillion to their heirs – a sum larger than the GDP of India which has a population of some 1.3 billion people. And while the incomes of the poorest 10 per cent of people around the world increased by less than $US3 a year between 1988 and 2011, the incomes of the richest one per cent increased 182 times as much.
The paper says that despite world leaders signing up to a global goal to reduce inequality, “the gap between the rich and the rest has widened”, a situation which “cannot continue”.
“Left unchecked, growing inequality threatens to pull our societies apart,” it says. “It increases crime and insecurity, and undermines the fight to end poverty. It leaves more people living in fear and fewer in hope.”
Elsewhere, the report shows that a CEO of a FTSE-100 company earns as much in a year as 10,000 people in working in garment factories in Bangladesh, that the richest man in Vietnam earns more in just one day than the poorest person earns in 10 years, and that one in nine people around the world still go to bed hungry.
The paper calls for a range of actions aimed at ending the “extreme concentration of wealth”, including limiting the pay of CEOs, encouraging business models that do not provide undue reward to shareholders and increasing top rates of income tax in “almost every country”.
Meanwhile a “fact sheet” addressing the situation in Australia shows that the one per cent wealthiest people possess more than 22 per cent of total Australian wealth, more than that of the combined wealth the bottom 70 per cent of Australians.
Oxfam Australia has called on the Australian Government to address the issue of income inequality through a range of measures including tackling corporate tax dodging through full public tax transparency, ending the use of tax havens and the “race to the bottom” on corporate tax rates, moving beyond GDP growth and reporting on indicators of Australian progress, and using instruments such as land taxes, extreme net wealth taxes and high income taxes to reduce extreme wealth concentration.
They also call on corporations to address the issue through such measures as paying their fair share of tax, ending the use of tax havens, ensuring living wages and fair conditions for all workers in supply chains and minimising the impact of business on the environment.
