Oxfam: The Rich are Getting Richer Despite Pandemic, While 160 Million Sink Into Poverty

The world’s wealthiest people have seen their riches grow exponentially at a time when many people have lost their jobs to the pandemic, according to a report by income equality advocacy group Oxfam.

The 10 richest people in the world more than doubled their fortunes during the first two years of the pandemic, with their combined wealth surging to US$1.5 trillion from US$700 billion. That translates to US$15,000 per second or US$1.3 billion per day, said Oxfam in its report titled “Inequality Kills.”

“If these ten men were to lose [99.999%] of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than [99%] of all the people on this planet,” said Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam International’s executive director. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”

Citing Forbes data, Oxfam said the world’s 10 richest men are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and family, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, and Warren Buffet.

All the world’s billionaires have seen their combined wealth soar to US$13.8 trillion, a massive US$5 trillion surge since March 2021. This means that the ultra-rich’s wealth has grown more during the first two years of the pandemic than it has in the last 14 years.

Bucher said the US$16 trillion financial aid that governments across the world have pumped into their economies to cushion the impact of the pandemic “ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom.”

Based on the Oxfam report, a new billionaire has been minted every 26 hours since the pandemic started.

To address the gap in income inequality, Oxfam called on governments to impose permanent wealth and capital taxes on billionaires’ gains acquired during the pandemic and invest the money gathered from these taxes in universal healthcare, social protection, and climate change, among others.

It also called on governments to waive intellectual property rules covering technologies used to develop COVID-19 vaccines so more countries would be encouraged to produce their own shots to fight off the pandemic.