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Afghanistan: Oxfam Study Finds Richest 1% Is Likely to Control Half of Global Wealth by 2016

2015/01/20

The richest 1 % are likely to control additional than half of the globe’s total wealth by next year, the charity Oxfam reported in a study released on Monday. The warning about deepening world inequality comes just as the world’s business elite prepare to meet this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The 80 wealthiest people in the world all own $1.9 trillion, the statement found, nearly the same all shared by the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the world’s gain scale. (Last year, it took 85 billionaires to equal that figure.) And the richest 1 % of the people, who number in the millions, control nearly half of the world’s total wealth, a share that is as well increasing.

The type of inequality that currently characterizes the world’s economies is unlike anything seen in recent years, the statement explained. “Between 2002 and 2010 the total wealth of the poorest half of the world in current U.S. dollars had been increasing additional or less at the same rate as that of billionaires,” it said. “However since 2010, it has been decreasing over that time.”

Winnie Byanyima, the charity’s executive director, noted in a statement that additional than a billion people lived on less than $1.25 a day.
“Do we really want to live in a world where the 1 % own additional than the rest of us combined?” Ms. Byanyima said. “The scale of world inequality is completely simply staggering.”

Investors with interests in finance, insurance and health saw the biggest windfalls, Oxfam said. Using data from Forbes magazine’s inventory of billionaires, it said those listed as having interests in the pharmaceutical and health care industries saw their net worth jump by 47 %. The charity credited those individuals’ rapidly growing fortunes in part to multimillion-dollar lobbying campaigns to protect and enhance their interests.
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