EXPLAINER | WHY THE WORLD’S FIVE RICHEST PEOPLE BAG MORE WEALTH AS POVERTY GAP WIDENS

Poverty inequality across the world is exploding, with the rich hoarding a disproportionate amount of global wealth while the already vulnerable are getting fewer resources.

That’s according to a new report released this week by the nongovernmental organisation Oxfam. The charity publishes an annual report on world poverty to coincide with the yearly World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. The forum is a gathering of the world’s business elite – from CEOs of big corporations to self-made billionaires – to discuss global trade issues.

But while the world’s few rich elite pile up wealth, world poverty has increased for the first time in nearly three decades, Oxfam said.

Here’s why the charity says inequality is widening, and how it suggests redistributing the wealth:

Multiple crises lead to rich getting richer and poor getting poorer

The disruptions that followed the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns – as well as the inflation that hit many parts of the world in 2022 as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, which also disrupted supply chains – have contributed to making more people around the world poorer.

According to Oxfam’s analysis, at least 1.7 billion workers globally saw inflation rise faster than their wages in 2022, limiting their abilities to buy food and to pay their energy bills.

Meanwhile, at the same time, the tiny elite group who are the wealthiest people in the world have only gotten richer, according to Oxfam’s findings.

In the past 10 years, more than half of the new wealth created globally has been directed to the pockets of the richest one percent of humanity. But between 2020 and 2021 alone, that rate accelerated still further, with the richest one percent getting 63 percent of all new wealth, leaving 99 percent of the world population with just 37 percent of new global revenue.

Those inequalities have gender and racial tinges, too, Oxfam found. Men owned $105 trillion more wealth than women, while Black families in the United States had only 15.8 percent of the wealth of a normal white household.

“While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams,” Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam’s director, said in a press release. “Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires — a roaring ‘20s boom for the world’s richest.”

In the past, Oxfam’s annual state of inequality reports have been criticised for including indebted individuals in their calculations of the world’s poorest people. The organisation used data from Credit Suisse, the Institute for Policy Studies, and Forbes, among others, to make its calculations.

But an October 2023 report from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) found that while the number of people in poverty has dropped globally, the number of those living in extreme poverty has spiked by 80 percent in 13 of the least developed countries, corroborating some of Oxfam’s findings.

What’s driving the inequality?

According to the Oxfam report, billionaires gained hugely from the pandemic. As rich countries pumped money into their economies to support families and those who were out of jobs or earning low wages, they also drove up the value of assets and wealth already held by the superrich.

Oxfam also found that wealthy people who hold shares in the world’s biggest food and energy corporations reaped dramatic profits in 2022. As those companies recorded huge returns, doubling their profits that year, they also paid out large amounts in dividends.

One of the most important factors driving the inequality gap further, Oxfam also found, was the absence of progressive taxation on the new wealth being generated. The report found that rich people are paying way less tax than they were a decade ago, in several countries. Half of the world’s billionaires, the report said, also live in countries where they don’t have to pay any taxes on inherited wealth, meaning that $5 trillion in wealth is set to be passed on, tax free.

All those elements have seen the world’s billionaires go from holding a combined $6 trillion in 2012 to about $14 trillion in 2022, the report said.

Oxfam warned that the continued accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few could delay countries’ economic growth, contribute to political divides and lead to corruption across sectors.

It could also lead to more pollution for the climate, the report found, as billionaires are more likely to invest in fossil fuels.

Is there a solution?

Higher taxes, the Oxfam report said, are one way to redistribute concentrated wealth and close the inequality gap.

In many countries, the rich have been seeing their wealth taxed less in recent decades, as politicians argue that less taxing will allow corporations to hire more employees, prompt more labour competition and raise average wages, eventually allowing more wealth to trickle down to the ordinary person.

According to Oxfam data on countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the average tax rates on the richest people have fallen from 58 percent in 1980 to 42 percent at present.

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and owner of X, formerly Twitter, paid a “true tax rate” of around 3 percent between 2014 and 2018, Oxfam found.

But several reports have documented how tax cuts for rich corporations in the US, for example, have only further entrenched inequality levels.

In 2017, former US President Donald Trump promised Americans that his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would deliver benefits for the working class. The act aimed to slash corporate tax from 35 percent to about 20 percent for big organisations. Trump delivered $1.5m in tax cuts, the biggest corporate tax cut in US history.

However, in their book, The Triumph of Injustice – How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that in 2018, the 400 wealthiest families in the US paid an average tax rate of 23 percent in 2018, while the poorest households paid taxes at a rate of 24.2 percent, higher than the richest people.

A yearly 5 percent wealth tax, Oxfam said, could help mobilise up to $1.7 trillion to address humanitarian crises around the world, and support countries bearing the brunt of climate change.