In the first two years of the pandemic, the 10 richest men in the world have more than doubled their wealth, from $ 700 to $ 1,500 billion, at a rate of $ 15,000 per second, $ 1.3 billion per day.
Over the same period 163 million people fell into poverty as a result of the pandemic.
The complaint comes from the Oxfam report ‘The pandemic of inequality’, on the occasion of the opening of the works of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Numbers that do not exempt Italy: according to Oxfam, after a 2020 in which over million individuals and 400,000 families have plunged into poverty, the concentration of wealth has continued to grow.
“Since the start of the Covid-19 emergency, every 26 hours a new billionaire has joined an elite made up of over 2,600 super-rich whose fortunes increased by as much as 5 trillion dollars, in real terms, between March 2020 and November 2021 “, denounces the non-governmental organization. Only for Jeff Bezos, the number one of Amazon, one of the companies whose turnover took off with COvid-19, Oxfam calculates a “capital surplus” in the first 21 months of the pandemic of 81.5 billion dollars, the equivalent of estimated cost of vaccination (two doses and booster) for the entire world population. The pandemic also hit women hardest, who lost $ 800 billion in incomes in 2020. Still, while male employment is showing signs of recovery, an estimated 13 million fewer women are employed by 2021 than in 2019.
An inequality pandemic in which central banks have intervened by pumping trillions to support the economy. “But most of these resources – says Gabriela Bucher, director of Oxfam International – ended up in the pockets of the billionaires riding the stock market boom”. Then there is the boom in profits in the pharmaceutical sector, “fundamental in the fight against the pandemic, but subject to the logic of profit and reluctant to temporarily suspend patents” to increase the production of vaccines and save lives in the poorest countries. According to Oxfam, the monopolies held by Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have made it possible to make profits “of $ 1,000 per second and create five new billionaires”. At the same time, “less than 1% of their vaccines have reached people in low-income countries”. The percentage of people with COVID-19 who die from the virus in developing countries – denounces the NGO – is about double that of rich countries, while to date in low-income countries only 4 has been vaccinated, 81% of the population.
In Italy, the share of wealth held by the top-1% continued to grow, with the richest 5% of Italians who, according to Oxfam, had wealth greater than that of the poorest 80% at the end of 2020. Between March 2020 and November 2021, the number of Italian billionaires on the Forbes List increased by 13 and the aggregate value of the wealth of the super-rich grew by 56% to 185 billion euros at the end of last November. “The social situation could have been even more serious if the Government had not strengthened the existing protection measures and put in place new emergency income support tools”, explains Elisa Bacciotti, Campaigns Manager at Oxfam Italia. However, according to the NGO, the 2021 employment recovery is not driven by stable jobs and risks re-projecting us into the pre-pandemic world, which has seen the share of the working poor grow by more than 6 percentage points since the beginning of the 1990s. “We believe – says Bacciotti – that the rationalization of support measures for families with children undertaken by the current government is largely appreciable”. Instead, “the choices regarding the reform of the tax system appear questionable to us, forgetting the objective of guaranteeing greater horizontal equity in favor of quantitative growth”.
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Source From: Ansa
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