The NGO Oxfam launched this Monday (23) during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) its traditional report on global inequality, in which it states that the world has gained 573 new billionaires since 2020, and that this year a billionaire appears every 30 hours.
The figure represents a slowdown from January, when Oxfam projected a new billionaire every 26 hours.
The study “Profiting from Pain”, which examines the growth of fortunes during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, also points out that the total wealth of the 2,668 billionaires on the planet today is equivalent to 13.9% of global GDP, a share that is almost triple what it was in 2000 (4.4%) and amounts to US$ 12.7 trillion (about R$ 61 trillion, or 38 times Brazil’s GDP).
During the pandemic, the energy, food, technology and medicine sectors were the ones that most concentrated billionaires and companies with high profits. At the top of the list is Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, who, according to the NGO, would remain among the richest 0.0001% in the world even if he disposed of 99% of his equity, eightfold in two years.
In the same period, income gaps between rich and poor and between men and women widened, in addition to discrepancies in access to health care having increased.
Oxfam prepares its report based on the list of billionaires published annually by Forbes magazine, which excludes debts from equity, from March 18, 2021 to March 11, 2022, and then applies on the 2020 data, the comparative basis, the official consumer inflation in the United States.
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