Pandemic created a new billionaire every 30 hours, now 1 million people could fall into extreme poverty at same pace
Over 263 million people will fall into extreme poverty this year.
Releasing a report titled 'Profiting from Pain', Oxfam International on Monday (May 23, 2022) said that the Covid-19 pandemic has seen one new billionaire emerging every 30 hours, while nearly one million people could be pushed into extreme poverty every 33 hours this year.
As the rich and powerful from across the globe gathered in the Swiss town of Davos for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022, Executive Director of Oxfam International Gabriela Bucher said that the decades of progress on extreme poverty are "now in reverse" and millions of people are facing "impossible rises" in the cost of simply staying alive.
The total wealth of billionaires across the globe is now equivalent to 13.9% of the world’s gross domestic product, Oxfam International said. The organisation said that this was a three-fold increase from 2000, when the figure was 4.4%.
The wealth of billionaires from the food and energy sectors has increased by a billion dollars every two days during the pandemic, Oxfam said.
In total, there are 2,668 billionaires in the world now. The world’s ten richest men now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of the human population (3.1 billion persons), according to the organisation.
Oxfam said its calculations are based on the most up-to-date and comprehensive data sources available. Figures on the very richest in society come from the Forbes billionaire list.
The report said the richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa.
It also said it was time to "end crisis profiteering" by rolling out a "temporary excess profit tax" of 90 percent on windfall profits of big corporations.
Oxfam added that an annual wealth tax on millionaires of two percent, and five percent for billionaires, could generate $2.52 trillion a year.
Such a wealth tax would help lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty, make enough vaccines for the world and pay for universal health care for people in poorer countries, it said.