The world’s 85 richest are worth as much as the 3.5 billion poorest
Wealthy elites have co-opted political power to rig the rules of the economic game, undermining democracy and creating a world where the 85 richest people own the wealth of half of the world’s population, worldwide development organisation Oxfam warns in a report published today.
“Working For the Few”, published ahead of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, details the pernicious impact that widening inequality is having in both developed countries and in developing countries, helping the richest undermine democratic processes and insist on policies that promote their interests at the expense of everyone else.
The report says that there is a growing global public awareness of this power-grab. Polls carried out for Oxfam in the UK, Brazil, India, South Africa, Spain and US show that most people in all six countries believe that laws are skewed in favour of the rich. The UK polling carried out by Research Now, found that two-thirds of people thought ‘the rich had too much influence over the direction the country is headed’ and only one in ten disagreed. The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the OECD club of rich nations.
The report says:
- Globally, the richest individuals and companies hide trillions of dollars away from the tax man in a web of tax havens around the world – it is estimated that $21 trillion is held unrecorded and off-shore;
- In the US, financial deregulation directly correlates to the increase in the income share of the top 1 per cent which is now at its highest level since the eve of the Great Depression;
- In India, the number of billionaires increase tenfold in the past decade, aided by a highly regressive tax structure and the wealthy exploiting their government connections, while spending on the poorest remains remarkably low;
- In Europe, austerity has been imposed on the poor and middle classes under huge pressure from financial markets whose wealthy investors have benefited from state bailouts of financial institutions;
- In Africa, global corporations – particularly those in extractive industries – exploit their influence to avoid taxes and royalties, reducing the resources available to governments to fight poverty.