The world’s five richest men doubled their fortunes from 2020 to now, while nearly five billion people globally became poorer in the same period, a report by non-governmental organisation Oxfam International said on Monday.
The organisation also noted that India, in particular, faces “rising industrial concentration”, especially in the hands of the country’s top five firms.
The report, titled, “Inequality Inc”, was published ahead of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland’s Davos – in which political leaders, corporate executives and economists will participate.
In this backdrop, the NGO said that billionaires are now 34% richer than they were at the beginning of the decade, with their wealth growing three times as fast as the rate of inflation. The report predicted that the world will have its first trillionaire within this decade.
American businessman and founder of e-commerce company Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who is one of the world’s richest men, increased his fortune of $167.4 billion (Rs 13.8 lakh crore) by $32.7 billion (Rs 2.71 lakh crore) since 2020, the report said.
In recent years, Amazon has faced allegations of allowing an unhealthy working environment and preventing unionisation by workers to stop them from demanding better working conditions.
The Oxfam report said that the world’s richest 1% individuals own 43% of all global financial assets. Further, the world’s richest 1% emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity, it said.
“We are living through what appears to be the start of a decade of division: in just three years, we have experienced a global pandemic, war, a cost-of-living crisis and climate breakdown,” Oxfam said. “Each crisis has widened the gulf – not so much between the rich and people living in poverty, but between an oligarchic few and the vast majority.”
The NGO said that on the other hand, the wages of 79.1 crore workers failed to keep up with inflation in the past two years. As a result, workers lost $1.5 trillion, or Rs 124 lakh crore, in this period, it calculated.
In order to illustrate how privatisation drives inequalities, Oxfam noted that Dalits in India “face high and unaffordable out-of-pocket fees in the private healthcare sector, financial exclusion in the private education sector; and overt discrimination in both”.
The organisation also said that India – along with Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda – was among the countries where private healthcare providers were pushing people into poverty.
“In India, where the private healthcare sector is now worth US$236bn [Rs 19.55 lakh crore] and rising rapidly, the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation [IFC], has directly invested over half a billion dollars in some of the country’s largest corporate hospital chains owned by some of its richest billionaires,” the report noted.
Oxfam said, however, that as of June, the International Finance Corporation had not published even a single evaluation of its health projects in the country since they began 25 years ago.
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