Oxfam report: Nearly 230 years needed to end global poverty

NEW DELHI: Oxfam’s latest report titled ‘Inequality Inc.’ reveals that it may take approximately 230 years to eradicate global poverty.

Meanwhile, the collective wealth of the world’s five wealthiest individuals has surged from $405 billion in 2020 to an astonishing $869 billion in 2023. The report states that since 2020, five billion people, which accounts for 60 per cent of the global population, have grown poorer. If the wealth of the five richest billionaires continues to rise at the same rate as it has over the past half-decade, the world will see its first trillionaire within ten years.

The report stated that the global economy has entered a new era of widening inequality.

“We are living through what appears to be the start of a decade of division: In just three years, we have experienced a global pandemic, war, a cost-of-living crisis, and climate breakdown. Each crisis has widened the gulf — not so much between the rich and people living in poverty, but between an oligarchic few and the vast majority,” the report says.

Oxfam argues that the ultra-rich are using their corporate power to increase the wealth of the few.

“Corporations are driving inequality through squeezing workers, for example, dodging taxes — corporations aren’t paying the rates that smaller businesses are, that ordinary folks are; through privatising the state — really we’ve seen in so many countries the sell-off of what is public to the state; and also plundering the planet,” said, Nabil Ahmed, Director at Oxfam.