Reality check: Wealth inequality is rising across the world

The growing concentration of the world's wealth has been highlighted by an Oxfam report which revealed that 26 richest billionaires in the world own the same wealth as 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.

The World Inequality Report 2018 showed that between 1980 and 2016 the poorest 50% of humanity only captured 12 cents in every dollar of global income growth. By contrast, the top 1% captured 27 cents of every dollar. The lesson is clear: to beat poverty, we must fight inequality.

The widening gap was hindering the fight against poverty, adding that an extra wealth tax of just 0.5% on the richest 1% would raise enough to educate all 262 million out-of-school children and provide healthcare that would prevent 3.3 million deaths.

Oxfam said the wealth of billionaires across the globe increased by $900 billion in 2018 - or $2.5 billion a day. This increase in the wealth of the richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world's population.

As per report, the number of billionaires owning as much as wealth as half the world's population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61. Thereby showing the increased concentration of wealth in the hands of the super wealthy.

Between 2017 and 2018 a new billionaire was created every two days. In contrast 3.4 billion people (almost half of humanity) have barely escaped poverty and are living on less than $5.50 a day.

The world's richest man, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, saw his fortune increase to $112 billion. Just 1% of Bezos's fortune is equivalent to the health budget of Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.

The report also noted that, if all the unpaid care work done by women across the globe was carried out by a single company, it would have an annual turnover of $10 trillion which is equivalent to 43 times the revenue of Apple.

The super-rich are hiding $7.6 trillion from the tax authorities. Corporates also hide large amounts offshore. Together this deprive developing countries of $170 billion a year.

Oxfam has shown that the average carbon footprint of the richest 1% could be as much as 175 times higher than that of the bottom 10%. To get us to a situation where everyone on earth is living on more than $5 a day with current levels of inequality would require the global economy to be 175 times bigger than it is today, which would destroy our planet. The only way we can beat poverty while saving our planet is by tackling inequality.