Pandemic increases super-rich’ share of global wealth, study says

Billionaires’ share of global household wealth rose by record during the Covid-19 pandemic, and millionaires also come out of the pandemic ahead of time, a study revealed on Tuesday (7).

Produced by a network of social scientists, the World Inequality Report estimated that this year billionaires collectively own 3.5% of global household wealth, more than just over 2% seen at the start of the pandemic that erupted earlier in 2020.

“The Covid crisis exacerbates the inequalities between the very rich and the rest of the population,” said lead author Lucas Chancel, noting that rich economies have used massive fiscal support to alleviate the sharp increases in poverty seen elsewhere.

The report drew on a variety of expert research and public domain data, and its foreword was written by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, US-based economists and two members of the trio who received a Nobel Prize for their work on poverty in 2019 .

“As wealth is a major source of future economic gains and, increasingly, of power and influence, this bodes well for further increases in inequality,” they wrote of what they termed an “extreme concentration of economic power in hands of a very small minority of the super-rich”.

The findings support a number of existing studies, “rich lists” and other evidence pointing to a rise in health, social, gender and race inequalities during the pandemic.