The world’s 10 wealthiest people doubled their fortunes during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic as poverty and inequality soared, a report said yesterday.
Oxfam said that the people’s wealth jumped from US$700 billion to US$1.5 trillion, at an average rate of US$1.3 billion per day, in a briefing published before a virtual mini-summit of world leaders being held under the auspices of the World Economic Forum.
A confederation of charities that focus on alleviating global poverty, Oxfam said that the billionaires’ wealth rose more during the pandemic than it did the previous 14 years, as the world economy experienced the worst recession since the 1929 Depression.
It called this inequality “economic violence,” saying that inequality is contributing to the death of 21,000 people per day due to a lack of healthcare, gender-based violence, hunger and climate change.
The virus has plunged 160 million people into poverty, with ethnic minorities and women bearing the brunt of the impact, it said.
The report follows a study released last month by the group, which found that the share of global wealth of the world’s richest people soared at a record pace during the pandemic.
Oxfam urged tax reform to fund worldwide vaccine production, as well as healthcare, climate adaptation and a reduction in gender-based violence to help save lives.
The group said that it used the 2021 Billionaires List compiled by the US business magazine Forbes.
Forbes listed the world’s 10 richest people as: Tesla Inc and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft Corp CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, former Oracle Corp CEO Larry Ellison, US investor Warren Buffett, and LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault.
Yesterday, Oxfam called for governments to impose a one-time 99 percent tax on the world’s billionaires and use the money to fund expanded production of vaccines for the poor — part of an effort to combat global inequality widened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The pandemic has been a billionaire bonanza,” Oxfam International executive director Gabriela Bucher said in an interview. “When governments did the rescue packages and pumped trillions into the economy and to financial markets in order to support the economy for all, what happened is a lot of it went into the pockets of the billionaires.”
A one-off 99 percent tax on the 10 richest people’s pandemic windfalls could earn more than US$800 billion and be used to fund that effort and other progressive social spending, the group said.
The money “would be able to pay for vaccines for the whole world, have health systems for everyone,” Bucher said.
“We would also be able to compensate for the damage of climate change and have policies that address gender-based violence,” while still leaving the 10 billionaires US$8 billion richer than they were at the start of the pandemic, she added.
Additional reporting by AP
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