Billionaires thriving as poor suffer found in widening COVID-19 divide: Oxfam
25 January, 2021
Billionaires including Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk have seen their wealth soar through the COVID-19 pandemic as the world's poor face years of hardship, charity Oxfam said on Monday since it demanded steps to deal with inequality.
Nations have a "shrinking window of option" to build a fair, green recovery, according to "The Inequality Virus" article, published due to global leaders listen in for the Environment Economic Forum's virtual "Davos Dialogue" meeting.
"We stand to witness the best rise in inequality since information began," Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International, said in a statement as the charity needed bigger wealth taxes and stronger protections for workers.
"Rigged economies will be funneling prosperity to a rich elite who will be riding away the pandemic in high end, while those on the frontline of the pandemic - store assistants, healthcare employees, and market vendors - are struggling to pay the bills."
COVID-19 has unleashed an economic storm that hit the poor and vulnerable hardest, with women and marginalized staff facing the worst of job losses and the World Bank warning more than 100 million people could possibly be pushed into extreme poverty.
It could take greater than a decade to reduce the quantity of people moving into poverty back again to pre-crisis amounts, Oxfam said.
Meanwhile, the collective riches of the world's billionaires rose $3.9 trillion between March and December 2020 to reach$11.95 trillion, the report calculated.
The 10 richest men - a list led by Bezos and Musk which also contains LVMH luxury group's CEO Bernard Arnault, Microsoft's Expenses Gates and Facebook CEO Tag Zuckerberg - saw their net worth increase by $540 billion in the same period, Oxfam said.
That sum would be enough to avoid anyone from falling into poverty therefore of the pandemic and purchase a vaccine for everyone on the planet, researchers calculated.
The pandemic marks a "pivotal" point which includes exposed financial disparities and built support for "transformative" plans, Oxfam said, calling for higher taxes on wealth and corporations alongside more powerful protections for workers.
A momentary tax on excess gains created by the 32 global corporations which may have profited the virtually all through the pandemic could possess raised $104 billion in 2020, Oxfam said.
International cooperation would be important to implementing various changes, stated Jayati Ghosh, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was simply among the economists polled by Oxfam for the report.
The administration of new U.S. President Joe Biden will spur "even more willingness" for joint action on concerns incorporating a crackdown on tax havens and a bailout for growing nations, she advised the Thomson Reuters Base by phone.
"There are a few very, incredibly big hurdles, but there are lots of things that can be done rapidly," she added.
Source: japantoday.com
TAG(s):