Oxfam: Global Income Inequality Widening Since COVID-19

Five billion people grow poorer

The gap between the rich and poor is widening rather than receding globally, with about five billion people or 60 per cent of the world's eight billion population already poorer, a new report from Oxfam has revealed.

Oxfam is a United Kingdombased charity, which looks at the extreme ends of income distribution around the globe.

According to the report, global income inequality has grown for the first time in 25 years.

This is defined as the gap between the Global North – the world's developed, high-income countries mostly situated in the northern hemisphere – and the Global South, which describes developing and least-developed countries largely found in the southern hemisphere.

Oxfam explained that when it came to wealth distribution, over two-thirds (69 per cent) of global wealth was held by the developed nations, while less than a third could be found in the developing world.

The world's richest people and their share of wealth were also highly concentrated in the developed world, adding that, the top one per cent now owned 43 per cent of all global financial assets.

The UK-based think-tank noted that at the same time, only 0.4 per cent of the world's largest and most influential companies were committed to paying staff a living wage – that was remuneration that enabled people “to afford a decent standard of living.”

According to Oxfam, 4.8 billion people had become poorer than they were in 2019, with women, racialised and marginalised communities bearing the brunt of this development.

It stated that the wealth of black households in the United States was typically less than 16 per cent of that of a white household.

Similarly, in Brazil, the average income of white people was 70 per cent higher than that of descendants of African lineage.

Oxfam also added that women had some of the poorest-paid and least secure jobs.

Work undertaken by women was often seriously undervalued, it stressed, adding that the statistics also revealed that men owned $105 trillion more than women – equivalent to more than four times the size of the US economy.

In addition to this was the high share of work undertaken by women in care and domestic work that went unpaid.

According to Oxfam, women's unpaid work in care alone was worth $10.8 trillion annually to the economy, three times the size of the global technology sector.

On solutions to income inequality, the UK-based organisation noted that with only around one-tenth of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for eradicating inequality achieved to date, the question remained as to which strategies might be deployed to close the gap.