The world’s wealthiest 1% have amassed nearly two-thirds of the $42 trillion in new wealth created since 2020, according to a new report released on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
It reveals that the 1% have accumulated almost twice as much wealth as the remaining 99% of the world’s population.
According to a new report from Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world’s population has captured nearly two-thirds of all new wealth, worth $42 trillion, created since 2020. This is almost twice as much as the bottom 99% of the population. The report, titled “Survival of the Richest,” was released on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where elites are gathering as extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years.
The report reveals that over the past decade, the richest 1% have captured around half of all new wealth. During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63%) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1%, while $16 trillion (37%) went to the rest of the world put together. A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%.
Billionaires have seen extraordinary increases in their wealth, with billionaire fortunes increasing by $2.7 billion a day. This comes on top of a decade of historic gains, with the number and wealth of billionaires having doubled over the last ten years. In 2022, 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits, making $306 billion in windfall profits and paying out $257 billion (84%) of that to rich shareholders.
At the same time, at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages, and over 820 million people, roughly one in ten people on Earth, are going hungry. Entire countries are facing bankruptcy, with the poorest countries now spending four times more repaying debts to rich creditors than on healthcare.
In response to these findings, Oxfam is calling for a systemic and wide-ranging increase in taxation of the super-rich to claw back crisis gains driven by public money and profiteering. The organization estimates that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty. Oxfam also argues that decades of tax cuts for the richest and corporations have fueled inequality, with the poorest people in many countries paying higher taxes as a percentage of their income than the richest.