Oxfam’s director of campaigns and policy, Matthew Spencer, said: “The massive fall in the number of people living in extreme poverty is one of the greatest achievements of the past quarter of a century but rising inequality is jeopardising further progress.
The poorest 10% of Britons are paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%) once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account. Just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people. The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, saw his fortune increase to $112bn. In the 10 years since the financial crisis, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled.īetween 20 a new billionaire was created every two days. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.Īs a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day.
