01/14/2024 – 21:03
The fortunes of the five richest men in the world have more than doubled since 2020, from US$405 billion to US$869 billion, at a rate of US$14 million per hour. In the same period, however, almost 5 billion people became poorer. The survey is from the new Inequality SA report, launched this Monday (15) by Oxfam, an organization that is part of a global movement against poverty, inequality and injustice.
The report reveals that, if current trends continue, the world will have its first trillionaire within a decade, while the end of poverty could take more than 200 years to arrive. Oxfam advocates a series of measures to interrupt this cycle of wealth accumulation, such as offering public services, regulating companies, breaking up monopolies and creating permanent taxes on wealth and excess profits.
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The executive director of Oxfam Brasil, Katia Maia, highlights that the super-rich are increasingly concentrating power, in addition to wealth, and that this worsens inequalities in the world. “In Brazil, income and wealth inequality goes hand in hand with racial and gender inequality – our super-rich are almost all men and white. To build a fairer and less unequal country, we need to face this pact of whiteness among the richest”, says Katia, in a note.
The highlights of the report in relation to Brazil show that, on average, the income of white people is more than 70% higher than that of black people. Four of the five richest Brazilian billionaires have seen their wealth increase by 51% since 2020. Meanwhile, in the same period, 129 million Brazilians became poorer.
The richest person in the country has a fortune equivalent to that of half of the poorest population in Brazil, that is, 107 million individuals. The 1% of the richest have 60% of Brazil's financial assets.
Published on the start date of the 2024 World Economic Forum, which brings together the elite of the corporate world in Davos, Switzerland, the report shows that seven of the 10 largest companies in the world have a billionaire as CEO (executive director) or main shareholder. Such companies have an estimated value of US$10.2 trillion, more than the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of all countries in Africa and Latin America.
Katia Maia highlights that unbridled corporate and monopolistic power is a machine that generates inequality, which puts pressure on workers, promotes tax evasion, privatizes the State and encourages climate collapse. The conclusion is that companies are channeling most of the wealth generated in the world to a tiny portion of the population, which is already super rich.
“And they are also channeling power, undermining our democracies and our rights. No company or individual should have so much power over our economies and our lives. Nobody should have US$1 billion!”, adds Katia. Oxfam highlights how pharmaceutical monopolies deprived millions of people of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic, creating what it called a apartheid vaccine (segregation), while a group of billionaires continued to get rich.
For Amitabh Behar, interim executive director of Oxfam International, what society is witnessing is the beginning of a decade of division, with billions of people suffering the impacts of the pandemic, inflation and wars, at the same time as the fortunes of billionaires continue to rise. “This inequality is not accidental. The billionaire class is ensuring that corporations hand over more wealth to themselves at the expense of all of us,” he says in a statement.
Data from the report also reveals that, for every US$100 in profit made by each of the 96 largest companies in the world between July 2022 and June 2023, US$82 was paid to their richest shareholders.
Analysis of data from the World Benchmarking Alliance, carried out by Oxfam on more than 1,600 large corporations, showed that only 0.4% are publicly committed to paying fair wages. The organization estimates that it would take 1,200 years for a woman working in the healthcare sector to earn the amount that an average CEO of one of the companies on the magazine's 100 largest list would earn. Fortune earns in one year.
For Oxfam, governments must take responsibility in this scenario and drastically reduce the gap between the super-rich and the rest of society through actions, such as ensuring universal healthcare and education and exploring key sectors such as energy and transport.
“Public authorities can control unbridled corporate power and inequalities, forcing the market to be fairer and free from the control of billionaires. Governments must intervene to end monopolies, empower workers, tax these huge corporate profits and, crucially, invest in a new era of public goods and services,” recommends Behar.
According to the entity, governments need to control corporate power, including breaking up monopolies and democratizing patent rules, legislating on decent wages, limiting CEO salaries and creating taxes for the super-rich and companies, with an impact on the permanent wealth and excessive profits. The estimate is that a tax on the wealth of millionaires and billionaires could generate US$1.8 trillion per year.
According to Oxfam, the solution also involves reinventing business, taking the concentration of income out of the hands of shareholders and placing it in the hands of workers. For Oxfam, democratically owned companies better equalize business income. The organization estimates that if just 10% of U.S. businesses were worker-owned, it could double the share of wealth held by the poorest half of the country's population.
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