Billionaire wealth soars by $2 tr in 2024: Oxfam

Davos, PTI: Billionaire wealth across the globe surged by $2 trillion in 2024 to $15 trillion at a rate three times faster than the previous year, a study showed on Monday here as the richest of the world began to assemble for their annual jamboree in this ski resort town. In its flagship inequity report released every year on the first day of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Oxfam International contrasted the huge jump in billionaire wealth with the number of people living in poverty barely having changed since 1990. Wealth of billionaires in Asia will increase by $299 billion in 2024, Oxfam said while predicting that there will be at least five trillionaires within a decade from now.

The year 2024 saw 204 new billionaires getting minted an average of nearly four every week. Asia itself got 41 new billionaires in the year. In its report titled 'Takers, not Makers', Oxfam said the richest 1% in the Global North extracted $30 million an hour from the Global South through the financial systems in 2023. It further said that 60% of billionaire wealth is now derived from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections, showing that "extreme billionaire wealth is largely unmerited."The rights group urged governments across the world to tax the richest to reduce inequality, end extreme wealth, and dismantle the new aristocracy. It also sought that the former colonial powers must address past harms with reparations. Oxfam International's Executive Director Amitabh Behar told PTI here that the new inequality report shows there is an enormous explosion in the billionaire wealth and this is more worrisome due to the growing number of people living with hunger.

This only flags the issue of modern-day colonialism in the form of multinational corporates grabbing a huge portion of wealth being created, he said. Behar said Oxfam is strongly pitching for taxing super-rich more and welcomed the growing traction across the world for taxing the wealthiest more. Even bodies like the IMF and World Bank are expressing concern about this level of inequality, he added. On India and his expectations from the union budget, he said the government must try to address the issue of inequality including by way of much more progressive taxing and more investments in education, among other measures. A lot of people believed that colonialism ended long back but the fact is it is thriving even today in the form of wealth going out from Global South to the richest of the Global North.