FROM THE CORRESPONDENT TO DAVOS. Ever richer, ever further from the rest of the world, forced to suffer from the effects of the pandemic and the two wars, in Ukraine and the Middle East. While the World economic forum in Davos is about to get underway, the NGO Oxfam highlights how increasingly unequal the world of 2024 is. Between March 2020 and last November, the five richest men in the world, namely Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Warren Buffett have more than doubled, in real terms, their fortunes – from $405 billion to $869 billion – at a rate of $14 million an hour. And there is a fact that takes on a particular meaning, namely that “the richest 1% in the world owns 59% of all financial securities”. An unprecedented concentration, according to Oxfam.
In the Swiss town where the world‘s powerful will take stock of global challenges, trying to rebuild trust (which is the slogan of the WEF 2024), an increasingly dramatic picture of poverty, inequalities, social crises and extreme, almost unimaginable wealth emerges. «Inequality: power at the service of the few», the new report published by Oxfam as a corollary to the Davos event, draws a map with many lights and few shadows. From 2020 to today, the 5 richest men in the world have multiplied their fortunes by 114%, while 5 billion poorest people have seen their condition remain unchanged overall. It follows that, at current rates, it will take over 2 centuries (230 years, to be precise) to put an end to poverty. However, the NGO explains, within a decade we could have the first trillionaire in the history of humanity.
What is striking is the widening of the gap between those who have too much and those who have nothing. Between March 2020 and November 2023, billionaires’ wealth grew by $3.3 trillion in real terms (+34%), according to the report. And the growth rate was three times higher than inflation. On the other hand, the study analyzes, between 2019 and 2022 the overall wealth of the poorest 60% of humanity (almost 4.8 billion people) saw a decline of 0.2% in real terms (-20 billion dollars), thus managing to barely keep up with inflation. For 791 million employed workers in 52 countries, wages have not kept pace with inflation. The related wage bill has seen “a decline in real terms of 1,500 billion dollars in the last two years, a loss equivalent to almost a month’s salary (25 days) of wages for each worker”.
While on the one hand we struggle to keep up with the price increases, on the other we continue to earn money. The result of the report highlights an aspect that may seem almost paradoxical. After months of extra profits from credit institutions and energy companies, it is that «148 large companies, in 22-23, made profits of 1,800 billion dollars, with an increase of 52.5% compared to the average of the previous four years , lavishing huge compensation on its wealthy shareholders.”
According to Amitabh Behar, interim executive director of Oxfam International, «the report tells us that 7 of the 10 largest companies in the world have a billionaire as their CEO or major shareholder. These corporations have a value of 10,200 billion dollars, higher than the combined GDP of all the countries of Africa and Latin America.” Not only. Behar attacks the global King Midas: «It seems like we are living in a dystopian movie, that we are at the dawn of a ‘decade of great gaps’, with billions of people bearing the weight of epidemics, inflation, wars, and a handful of super- rich people who multiply their fortunes at paroxysmal rates.”
The disparity is not only between the North and South of the world, but also gender. In particular, Oxfam states that “wealth is not a woman’s thing: globally, men hold $105 trillion more in wealth than women.” A gap equivalent to “4 times the size of the US economy”. The consequence is that “for a woman working in healthcare or social work it would take 1,200 years to earn what the CEO of one of the Fortune 100 companies earns on average in a year.” In Davos, which has been promoting female entrepreneurship for years, this is something that should give us food for thought. Because the gaps, too often, are only reduced, rather than eliminated completely.