Oxfam: Wealth of the World’s 10 Richest Men Has Doubled Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

Rabat – While the COVID-19 pandemic had severe repercussions on families’ incomes and the global economy, the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has doubled, an Oxfam study revealed on January 17.

In its latest policy paper entitled “Inequality Kills,” Oxfam underlined that the assets of the 10 wealthiest men skyrocketed collectively from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, at a rate of around $1.3 billion per day during the pandemic.

Oxfam made its calculations based on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires.

Forbes list is topped by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, US investor Warren Buffet, and Bernard Arnault, the head of the French luxury group LVMH.

Meanwhile, most people have sunk into poverty worldwide with 97 million living on less than $1.90 a day due to the ongoing crisis, while 99% of people’s incomes have plummeted during the pandemic, Oxfam said, citing World Bank data.

The UK-based confederation of charities, which focuses on combating global poverty, emphasized in its report that increasing economic, gender, and racial inequalities between countries “are tearing our world apart.”

Inequality contributes to the deaths of “at least 21,000 people a day” based on global deaths due to lack of access to health care, gender-based violence, hunger and the climate crisis, the report stressed.

“This is not by chance, but choice: ‘economic violence’ is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. This causes direct harm to us all, and to the poorest people, women and girls, and racialized groups most,” it noted.

Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam International’s executive director, stressed the need to start “righting the violent wrongs of this obscene inequality by clawing back elites’ power and extreme wealth including through taxation – getting that money back into the real economy and to save lives.”

Speaking of vaccine inequalities and shortages, Bucher argued that wealthy governments have allowed billionaires and pharmaceutical monopolies to cut off supply to billions of people, an approach that would likely increase inequality.

According to Oxfam’s calculations, an exceptional windfall tax of 99% on the wealth gains of the 10 richest men would go a long way towards paying for the manufacture of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines, in addition to funding other public projects, such as universal health and social protection.