The COVID 19 pandemic has aggravated the wealth inequality across the world. The top 10 richest men in the world have doubled their respective net wealth in the first two years of the pandemic from USD 700 billion to USD 1.5 trillion, as per a report by Oxfam, an organisation which advocats for alleviating global poverty.
The rate of wealth transfer to the billionaires occurred at USD 1.5 billion per day, Oxfam reported in a virtual conference at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit. Terming this as an “economic violence”, Oxfam said that the pandemic and associated lockdowns has plunged 160 million people into poverty across the world and the resultant income inequality is leading to 21000 deaths per day, as per a report by the AFP. These billionaires added more to their wealth in the last two years than they did since the 2008 Lehman Brothers-induced crisis, the report further states.
Commenting further, Oxfam noted that the non-white minorities as well as women faced the brunt of the pandemic resulting in ethnic and gender-based violence. Their situation has been worsened because of climate change, inaccessible healthcare, and food insecurity.
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The organisation also urged governments across the world to increase the wealth/corporate tax to fund/subsidise vaccine programmes in poor/middle-income countries as well as asked them to expand social security schemes such as public healthcare, women security, and subsidised food campaigns. The organisation claims to have done a thorough research based on latest data available to compile its report including the Forbes 2021 billionaires list.
As per the Forbes list of the 10 richest men in the world, Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk is at the top followed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google’s founders), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO), Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (former Microsoft’s CEOs), Larry Ellison (former Oracle CEO), US investor Warren Buffet and the head of the French luxury group LVMH, Bernard Arnault.
In December, World Inequality Lab reported that billionaires across the world witnessed steepest rise in their income since the organisation started keeping a tab on wealth inequality since 1995. “Their net worth grew by more than $3.6 trillion in 2020 alone, boosting their share of global household wealth to 3.5%,” the CNN quotes the organisation saying. The report says that the Top 1 percent captured 38 percent of the global wealth from 1995 to 2021 while the bottom 50 percent owned just 2 percent of the share.
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