It’s official. The global one percent of wealth holders now own more than the rest of the world combined, a new report released Monday confirmed.
“The global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes,” stated Oxfam International’s An Economy for the 1% (pdf), which found that the gap between the richest and poorest has widened so dramatically in the past 12 months that the world’s 62 wealthiest individuals now own as much as the poorest half of the global population, roughly 3.6 billion people.
In fact, the wealth of the poorest half has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010 while the wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 percent to total $1.76 trillion.
“It is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world’s population owns no more than a few dozen super-rich people who could fit onto one bus,” said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International.
The report comes just days before the opening of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, which will be held January 20-23 in Davos, Switzerland. At the conference, Oxfam is expected to reiterate their call for urgent action on the inequality crisis. Specifically, the group is calling for an end to the era of offshore tax havens.
“Far from trickling down, income and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate,” the report states. “Once there, an ever more elaborate system of tax havens and an industry of wealth managers ensure that it stays there, far from the reach of ordinary citizens and their governments. One recent estimate 4 is that $7.6 trillion of individual wealth—more than the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the UK and Germany—is currently held offshore.”