The world’s billionaires have doubled in the past decade and are richer than 60 percent of the global population, the UK-based charity Oxfam said yesterday.
It said poor women and girls were at the bottom of the scale, putting in “12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work each and every day,” estimated to be worth at least US$10.8 trillion a year.
Governments are “massively under-taxing” rich individuals and corporations, and underfunding public services, the organization said.
“Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist,” Oxfam India head Amitabh Behar said.
“The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies,” Behar said ahead of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, where he is to represent the international charity.
Oxfam’s annual report on global inequality is traditionally released just before the forum opens in the Swiss Alpine resort, which is scheduled for today.
The new report, Time to Care, has some astonishing statistics.
“The 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa,” it said.
If the world’s richest 1 percent paid just 0.5 percent extra tax on their wealth for 10 years, it would equal the investment needed to create 117 million new jobs in elderly and child care, education and health, Oxfam said.
Oxfam’s figures are based on data from Forbes magazine and Swiss bank Credit Suisse Group AG’s Global Wealth report, but they are disputed by some economists.
The organization has repeatedly defended its analysis and challenged such accusations, although it says the Global Wealth report suffers from poor quality of data and may even underestimate the scale of wealth disparities.
The numbers show that 2,153 billionaires now have more wealth than the 4.6 billion poorest people on the planet.
Women and girls are burdened in particular because they are most often care givers that keep “the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies moving,” Behar said.
They “often have little time to get an education, earn a decent living or have a say in how our societies are run,” and “are therefore trapped at the bottom of the economy,” he added.
“Across the globe, 42 percent of women cannot get jobs because they are responsible for all the caregiving, compared to just 6 percent of men,” the Oxfam report said.
It estimated that unpaid care work by women added at least US$10.8 trillion a year in value to the world economy — three times more than the tech industry.
“It is important for us to underscore that the hidden engine of the economy that we see is really the unpaid care work of women. And that needs to change,” Behar told Reuters in an interview.
Additional reporting by Reuters and Bloomberg
The demise of the coal industry left the US’ Appalachian region in tatters, with lost jobs, spoiled water and countless kilometers of abandoned underground mines. Now entrepreneurs are eyeing the rural region with ambitious visions to rebuild its economy by converting old mines into solar power systems and data centers that could help fuel the increasing power demands of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. One such project is underway by a non-profit team calling itself Energy DELTA (Discovery, Education, Learning and Technology Accelerator) Lab, which is looking to develop energy sources on about 26,305 hectares of old coal land in
Taiwan’s exports soared 56 percent year-on-year to an all-time high of US$64.05 billion last month, propelled by surging global demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing and cloud service infrastructure, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday. Department of Statistics Director-General Beatrice Tsai (蔡美娜) called the figure an unexpected upside surprise, citing a wave of technology orders from overseas customers alongside the usual year-end shopping season for technology products. Growth is likely to remain strong this month, she said, projecting a 40 percent to 45 percent expansion on an annual basis. The outperformance could prompt the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and
Netflix on Friday faced fierce criticism over its blockbuster deal to acquire Warner Bros Discovery. The streaming giant is already viewed as a pariah in some Hollywood circles, largely due to its reluctance to release content in theaters and its disruption of traditional industry practices. As Netflix emerged as the likely winning bidder for Warner Bros — the studio behind Casablanca, the Harry Potter movies and Friends — Hollywood’s elite launched an aggressive campaign against the acquisition. Titanic director James Cameron called the buyout a “disaster,” while a group of prominent producers are lobbying US Congress to oppose the deal,
Two Chinese chipmakers are attracting strong retail investor demand, buoyed by industry peer Moore Threads Technology Co’s (摩爾線程) stellar debut. The retail portion of MetaX Integrated Circuits (Shanghai) Co’s (上海沐曦) upcoming initial public offering (IPO) was 2,986 times oversubscribed on Friday, according to a filing. Meanwhile, Beijing Onmicro Electronics Co (北京昂瑞微), which makes radio frequency chips, was 2,899 times oversubscribed on Friday, its filing showed. The bids coincided with Moore Threads’ trading debut, which surged 425 percent on Friday after raising 8 billion yuan (US$1.13 billion) on bets that the company could emerge as a viable local competitor to Nvidia
RSS