The richest 1% will control more than half of the world’s wealth by next year, a new report concludes.
The study by Oxfam, a charity fighting poverty worldwide, said that global wealth is increasingly being concentrated on the small, wealthy elite.
The research paper titled “Wealth: Having it All and Wanting More”said that last year the richest 1% owned 48% of the global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the world’s remaining 3.5 billion of people. If this trend continues, the richest 1% will have more wealth than everyone else by 2016, the report said.
Combined, the 80 people with the most wealth in the world have $1.9 trillion, according to the report, up significantly since 2010. That’s the same amount wealth as the entire bottom half of the world’s income range.
The gap between the ultra rich and everyone else also is widening. In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to equal the wealth of the lower half of the world’s population. That’s nearly five times as many as today’s 80.
The current level of economic inequality in the world is stronger than it has been in some time, the report noted. One in nine people do not have enough to eat and more than a billion people still live on under $1.25 a day, Oxfam said.
Oxfam Executive Director Winnie Byanyima called the inequality “simply staggering,’’ asking “do we really want to live in a world where the one percent own more than the rest of us combined?’’
According to the billionaires list by Forbes magazine, of the 1,645 billionaires, 30% are U.S. citizens. One-third of them started from a position of wealth and nearly all are male and more than 50 years old.
Twenty percent of the billionaires mentioned having interests related to the financial and insurance sectors, the commonly cited sources of wealth for billionaires on Forbes’list. Billionaires in healthcare or pharmaceuticals saw the biggest windfalls in the past year, with their net worth jumping 47%.
Oxfam officials referenced the report in advance of the annual World Economic Forum Meeting Jan. 21-24 in Davos, Switzerland.
Byanyima warned that the explosion in inequality is holding back the fight against global poverty and called for urgent action to stem the trend, starting with a crackdown on corporate tax dodging and progress toward a global deal on climate change.
