An Economy For The 99 Per Cent

At the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, international charitable organisation, Oxfam, released a report stating that the world’s first global trillionaire will emerge 25 years from now, even as wealth inequalities increase unabated.

It is four years since the World Economic Forum identified rising economic inequality as a major threat to social stability, and three years since the World Bank took on the task of ending poverty. Despite world leaders signing to achieve a global goal to reduce inequality, the gap between the rich and the rest of the world has widened. As former president of the United States, Barack Obama, told the UN General Assembly in his departing speech, “A world where one per cent of humanity controls as much wealth as the bottom 99 per cent, will never be stable.” Yet, the global inequality crisis continues.

A summary of the key figures are:

• Since 2015, the richest one per cent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet.

• Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world.

• In the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1 trillion to their heirs — a sum larger than the GDP of India, a nation of 1.3 billion people.

• The incomes of the poorest 10 per cent of people increased by less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest one per cent increased 182 times.

• A FTSE-100 CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 people do working in garment factories in Bangladesh.