Super rich added $5 trillion to their wealth in last two years of COVID-19 pandemic-Oxfam

10 richest men in the world doubled their wealth from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, at an staggering average rate of $1.3 billion per day in last two years

According to the latest Oxfam report on global inequality, Billionaires added $5 trillion to their fortunes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report was released ahead of the World Economic Forum's online Davos Agenda, which will take place this week after the group's annual in-person meeting was delayed due to Omicron.

Oxfam said the billionaires’ wealth rose more during the pandemic more than it did the previous 14 years, when the world economy was suffering the worst recession since the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

It called this inequality “economic violence” and said inequality is contributing to the death of 21,000 people every day due to a lack of access to healthcare, gender-based violence, hunger and climate change.

 As the pandemic pushed millions into poverty in last two years of pandemic, the richest in the world concentrated more wealth in their hands. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated economic inequality as divide between richest and poorest people in world rises to new heights.

Oxfam says in a new report that the total wealth of billionaires jumped from $8.6 trillion in March 2020 to $13.8 trillion in November 2021, a bigger increase than in the previous 14 years combined. The world's richest 10 men saw their collective wealth more than double, shooting up by $1.3 billion a day.

Oxfam argues that governments should tax the gains made by the super-rich during the pandemic and use the money to fund health care systems, pay for vaccines, fight discrimination and address the climate crisis.

"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," Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam's executive director, said in a press release.

According to the report, the combined wealth of the top 10 billionaires including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos doubled during the pandemic and is now six times greater than that of the world's poorest 3.1 billion people.

"Inequality at such pace and scale is happening by choice, not chance," Bucher said. "Not only have our economic structures made all of us less safe against this pandemic, they are actively enabling those who are already extremely rich and powerful to exploit this crisis for their own profit."

The pandemic has plunged 160 million people into poverty, the charity added, with non-white ethnic minorities and women bearing the brunt of the impact as inequality soared.

The report follows a December 2021 study by the group which found that the share of global wealth of the world’s richest people soared at a record pace during the pandemic.

Oxfam urged tax reforms to fund worldwide vaccine production as well as healthcare, climate adaptation and gender-based violence reduction to help save lives.

The group said it based its wealth calculations on the most up-to-date and comprehensive data sources available, and used the 2021 Billionaires List compiled by the US business magazine Forbes.

The pandemic has not been the "great equaliser".  The World Bank estimates that 97 million people worldwide fell into extreme poverty in 2020 and is now living on less than $2 a day. The number of the worlds poorest also rose for the first time in over 20 years.

Vaccine inequality has become a major issue as many of the world's richest countries hoard shots, buying up enough doses to vaccinate their populations several times over and failing to deliver on their promises to share them with the developing world.

David Beasley, director of the United Nations' World Food Programme, called on billionaires including Bezos and Musk to "step up now, on a one-time basis" to help solve world hunger in November.

The call-out got a direct response from Musk, who later said on Twitter that if the organization could lay out "exactly how" the funding would solve the issue, he would "sell Tesla stock right now and do it." The TESLA CEO did not publicly respond when the UN released a plan.

Forbes listed the world’s 10 richest men as: Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, US investor Warren Buffet and the head of the French luxury group LVMH, Bernard Arnault.

                                                           Rukhsana Manzoor Deputy Editor