Every day last year, an extra 2.5 billion dollars flowed into the pockets of the ultra-rich, while 500 million flowed out of those of the poorest. The accusation comes from Oxfam, as the World Economic Forum gets under way in Davos.
"Something is not working in our economy". These are the words with which Oxfam, the NGO that fights poverty in Italy and around the world, addresses the world's leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "Those at the apex of the distributive pyramid continue to enjoy the benefits of economic growth in a disproportionate manner, while hundreds of thousands of people live in conditions of extreme poverty".
It has been exactly ten years since the global financial crisis, which lifted the lid off Pandora's box and exposed all the limitations of a model of development that until then had seemed infallible. Families and businesses paid the consequences on their own skin, made worse (especially in Europe) by the austerity policies imposed by governments.
And yet, there are those who seem magically immune to the economic hardships of the past decade. As the new study published by Oxfam highlights, since the onset of the crisis the number of billionaires in the world has nearly doubled (between 2017 and 2018 there was one new billionaire every two days). In the past year alone, an extra 900 billion dollars ended up in their pockets — 2.5 billion a day.
If we divide the world's population exactly in half, Oxfam proposes, we get two groups of 3.8 billion people each. The poorer of the two saw as much as 11 per cent of its wealth evaporate over the course of the last twelve months. If we add up the wealth of the 26 richest individuals in the world (last year there were 43), we reach a figure equal to that of the least fortunate 50 per cent of humanity.
It is probably difficult to imagine such an amount of money in the hands of so few individuals, so the report singles out one of them: Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. Just 1 per cent of his fortune (which totals 112 billion dollars) would be enough to cover almost the entire healthcare budget of Ethiopia, a country with 105 million inhabitants.
As a stylistic exercise, some might think that after all inequalities are not so serious: billionaires pay taxes, after all, which help fund the services we all benefit from. This apparently crystal-clear principle, however, is not properly applied, because (writes Oxfam) "wealth is particularly undertaxed".
Some examples? In wealthy countries, the highest rate of personal income tax has fallen on average from 62 per cent in 1970 to 38 per cent in 2013, while in developing countries it averages just 28 per cent. In Brazil and the United Kingdom the situation reaches a paradox: if we calculate taxes not in absolute terms but as a proportion of income, we find that the poorest 10 per cent of the population is worse off than the richest 10 per cent. Not to mention the 7,600 billion dollars that the super-wealthy are estimated to hide from the taxman.
From this comes a proposal: if governments were to raise taxes on the income of the most privileged 1 per cent by just 0.5 per cent, they would obtain sufficient resources to save the lives of 3.3 million people, or to send 262 million children to school.
Read also: Why the fight against tax havens is a matter of civilisation
Economic inequalities, Oxfam emphasises, are also inequalities in the social fabric. At a global level, the wealth held by men is 50 per cent higher than that held by women. The reason women often cannot study and work is that they shoulder (unpaid) the care of the elderly, children and the sick. If they were to down tools overnight and outsource all of this work to a single company, that company would have a turnover equal to 43 times that of Apple.
In the majority of the world's countries, Oxfam points out, financial resources are "the passport to better health and a longer life". This holds true both in developing countries such as Nepal, where a poor family's chances of losing a child before the age of five are tripled, and in advanced economies. In the most affluent areas of São Paulo, in Brazil, life expectancy is 79 years: exactly twenty-five more than in the most deprived neighbourhoods.
