The first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic saw incomes of 99 per cent of humanity fall and over 16 crore people were forced into poverty even as the world's ten richest men saw their fortune more than double to USD 1.5 trillion (over Rs 111 lakh crore) at a rate of USD 1.3 billion (Rs 9,000 crore) a day, a new study showed on Monday.
In its report titled 'Inequality Kills' released on the first day of the World Economic Forum's online Davos Agenda summit, Oxfam International further said inequality is contributing to the death of at least 21,000 people each day, or one person every four seconds.
This is a conservative finding based on deaths globally from lack of access to healthcare, gender-based violence, hunger, and climate breakdown, it added. The world's ten richest men saw their fortunes grow at a rate of USD 15,000 per second during the first two years of the pandemic and if these ten men were to lose 99.999 per cent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 per cent of all the people on this planet.
"They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people," said Oxfam International's Executive Director Gabriela Bucher. "It has never been so important 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," she said.
According to Oxfam, billionaires' wealth has risen more since COVID-19 began than it has in the last 14 years. At USD 5 trillion, this is the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began. A one-off 99 per cent tax on the ten richest men's pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay to make enough vaccines for the world; to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries; while still leaving these men USD 8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.
"Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom. Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to billions of people," said Bucher.
She alleged that the world's response to the pandemic has unleashed this economic violence particularly acutely across racialised, marginalised and gendered lines.
"As COVID-19 spikes this turns to surges of gender-based violence, even as yet more unpaid care is heaped upon women and girls," Bucher said. The study showed that the pandemic has set gender parity back from 99 years to now 135 years. Women collectively lost USD 800 billion in earnings in 2020, with 1.3 crore fewer women in work now than there were in 2019. 252 men have more wealth than all one billion women and girls in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean combined.
It further said that the pandemic has hit racialised groups hardest.
During the second wave of the pandemic in England, people of Bangladeshi origin were five times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the White British population. Black people in Brazil are 1.5 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than White people. In the US, 34 lakh Black Americans would be alive today if their life expectancy was the same as White people, according to Oxfam.