NAIROBI (Realist English). Billionaire wealth and corporate profits have soared to record levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, while over a quarter of a billion more people could crash to extreme levels of poverty in 2022 because of coronavirus, rising global inequality, and the shock of food price rises supercharged by the war in Ukraine.
Oxfam’s research has found that:
- Billionaires have seen their fortunes increase as much in 24 months as they did in 23 years.
- Billionaires in the food and energy sectors have seen their fortunes increase by a billion dollars every two days. Food and energy prices have increased to their highest levels in decades. 62 new food billionaires have been created.
- The combined crises of COVID-19, rising inequality, and rising food prices could push as many as 263 million people into extreme poverty in 2022, reversing decades of progress. This is the equivalent of one million people every 33 hours.
- At the same time a new billionaire has been minted on average every 30 hours during the pandemic.
This means that in the same time it took on average to create a new billionaire during the pandemic, one million people could be pushed into extreme poverty this year.
As billionaires gather in Davos, Switzerland, in person for the first time in over two years, they have a lot to celebrate. During the COVID-19 pandemic their mountain of wealth has reached unprecedented and dizzying heights. The pandemic – full of sorrow and disruption for most of humanity – has been one of the best times in recorded history for the billionaire class.
There are 2,668 billionaires in the world, 573 more than in 2020 when the pandemic began, according to the report of the global charity organization, published on the first day of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos. Oxfam warns that 263 million more people will face extreme poverty this year, at a rate of one million people every 33 hours.
The pandemic has created 40 new pharmaceutical billionaires, 98 profiting from the monopolies their companies hold over vaccines, treatments, tests, and personal protective equipment.
The total wealth of the world’s billionaires is currently equivalent to 13.9% of global GDP. This is a threefold increase, compared with 4.4% in 2000.
“The fortunes of billionaires have increased not because they have become smarter or work more. Workers work harder, for less pay and in worse conditions. The super-rich have been rigging the system with impunity for decades and are now reaping the benefits. They have seized a shocking amount of the world’s wealth as a result of privatization and monopolies, eviscerate regulation and workers’ rights, hiding their money in tax havens — and all this happens with the complicity of governments,” says the executive director of Oxfam International.
Thus, social inequality, already strong before COVID-19, has reached a new level. Governments urgently need to implement highly progressive tax measures that should be used to invest in effective and proven measures to reduce inequality.
