Billionaires’ wealth grows by €2.2billion/£1.9billion per day as half the world lives on €5/£5 per day

Almost half the world’s population live on less than €5/£5 per day while the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by €2.2billion/£1.9billion per day in 2018 alone, reveals a new report from Oxfam today. 

The report – Public Good or Private Wealth? – highlights how the global economy rewards those at the top while people living in poverty get poorer. Last year, the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw their wealth decline by 11 percent while billionaires’ fortunes rose by almost the same amount (12 percent). 

As political and business leaders gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Oxfam is calling on governments to address this rising inequality by tackling tax avoidance by corporates and wealthy individuals and providing quality, free universal public services that are key to reducing it. 

Jim Clarken, Oxfam Ireland Chief Executive, said: “Halving extreme poverty is one of our greatest global achievements over the last 30 years but this is being jeopardised by rising inequality. Our report shows how decades of progress in reducing global poverty has disturbingly slowed – the rate of reduction has halved since 2013 – with extreme poverty actually increasing in sub-Saharan Africa. 

“This is a direct result of inequality – the human cost of which can no longer be ignored – and is largely seen in a lack of access to quality public services. Tomorrow, as the elite convene in Davos, 262 million children will not go to school and almost 10,000 people will die because they cannot access healthcare.

“Tax avoidance by big businesses and wealthy individuals is depriving developing countries of US$170billion every year. By eliminating tax avoidance and agreeing a new set of rules to make the global tax system fairer, governments, including the Irish and UK governments, can ensure more money is spent on providing free universal public services that reduce inequality and enable people to thrive – and in many cases survive.”

Oxfam calls for the following actions to reduce the growing gap between the richest and the rest: 

• All governments should deliver universal free healthcare, education and other essential public services 
• To achieve this, everyone, including big businesses and wealthy individuals, need to pay their fair share of tax. This means ending tax avoidance and evasion by corporates and the wealthy. Ireland and the UK have an important role to play in this regard and needs to agree a new set of global rules and institutions to fundamentally redesign the tax system to make it fair, with developing countries having an equal seat at the table. These new rules would include increased transparency of multinational corporations (MNCs) tax affairs and implementing effective mechanisms to end profit shifting by MNCs at home and abroad. 

Clarken continued: “Unless our leaders at home and across the world act now to reduce inequality, the global goal agreed by world leaders to end extreme poverty by 2030 remains out of reach. But it doesn’t have to be this way – there is enough wealth in the world to provide everyone with a fair chance in life. This means working taps and toilets that don’t spread cholera and deadly disease; clinics with nurses, doctors, equipment and drugs; classrooms with teachers and supplies; a pension at the end of a hard-working life.”

Read the full report: https://www.oxfamireland.org/blog/public-good-or-private-wealth

ENDS

CONTACT: Spokespeople are available for interview. For more, please contact: Alice Dawson-Lyons at alice.dawsonlyons@oxfam.org or +353 (0) 83 198 1869

Notes to the editor: 

• The report, methodology document explaining how Oxfam calculated the figures, and the data set is available on request.
• Oxfam’s calculations are based on global wealth distribution data provided by the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Data book published in November 2018, which relate to the period June 2017-June 2018. The wealth of billionaires was calculated using the annual Forbes Billionaires list last published in March 2018. See the methodology for more details.
• Every year, Oxfam’s calculations about how many people own the same wealth as half the world are based on data available at the time. Credit Suisse has improved and expanded its data set, which means we can recalculate our figures for previous years. We can now calculate that last year 43 people owned the same as half the world. This year it’s 26. The year before last it was 61. 
• The World Bank report Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018 found that global poverty declined on average 1 percentage point per year between 1990 and 2015, but only 0.6 percentage points per year between 2013 to 2015, and may be further slowing.
• The UN estimates that tax avoidance by businesses costs developing countries $100bn a year.

Economist Gabriel Zucman estimates that the world’s poorest regions – Africa, Asia and Latin America – lose $70bn in annual revenue due to wealthy individuals’ use of tax havens.