Oxfam, an anti-poverty non-profit organization, has released a report stating that the richest eight people in the world possess the combined wealth of the world’s poorest half; meaning that only eight people possess the combined wealth of 3.6 billion people of the world according to Christian Science Monitor.
The report is titled “An economy for the 99%” and it emphasizes the fact that the 10 biggest corporations in the world are richer than the revenues of 180 poor countries combined, and that a single rich man among the eight richest earns as much as 10,000 factory workers get paid in Bangladesh, the USA TODAY clarified.
The report was published after Oxfam visited Davos in Switzerland where the World Economic Forum meeting is scheduled to hold this week. The purpose of the conference is to examine extreme income inequality among nations and seek ways to reduce this.
The eight listed wealthiest individuals with the combined wealth of half of the world’s poorest are all men and largely Americans.
These persons are Bill Gates ($75 billion, source of wealth Microsoft); Amancio Ortega ($67 billion, Zara); Warren Buffett ($60.8 billion, Berkshire Hathaway); Carlos Slim Helu ($50 billion, Telecom); Jeff Bezos ($45.2 billion, Amazon); Mark Zuckerberg ($44.6 billion, Facebook); Larry Ellison ($43.6 billion, Oracle); and Michael Bloomberg ($40 billion, Bloomberg LP).
The executive director of Oxfam International, Winnie Byanyima, noted that hundreds of millions of people remain ever poor because they are trapped in inequality, a development that now undermines democracy everywhere and threatens to fracture the very societies that host us.
“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when 1 in 10 people survive on less than $2 a day,” Byanyima said.
According to Oxfam, “From Nigeria to Bangladesh, from the U.K. to Brazil, people are fed up with feeling ignored by their political leaders, and millions are mobilizing to push for change.” Meanwhile, Russia was discovered to be the most unequal in the world simply because the richest 1% of the country owns 74.5% of the country’s total wealth, according to Credit Suisse.