Richest 1% Took 38% of New Global Wealth Since 1995. The Bottom Half Got Just 2% / India: extreme inequality in numbers
Jake Johnson/Common Dreams In the nearly three decades since 1995, members of the global 1% have captured 38% of all new wealth while the poorest half of humanity has benefited from just 2%, a finding that spotlights the stark and worsening gulf between the very rich and everyone else. That’s according to the latest iteration of the World Inequality Report, an exhaustive summary of worldwide income and wealth data that shows inequities in wealth and income are “about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.”
“Indeed, the share of
income presently captured by the poorest half of the world’s people is about
half what it was in 1820, before the great divergence between Western countries
and their colonies,” the report notes. “In other words, there is still a long
way to go to undo the global economic inequalities inherited from the very
unequal organization of world production between the mid-19th and mid-20th
centuries.”
The authors of the new
report, released in full on Tuesday, go out of their way to stress that
contemporary inequities in wealth and income are not inevitable, but rather the
consequence of deliberate decisions by policymakers within individual countries
and on the global stage.
“The Covid crisis has
exacerbated inequalities between the very wealthy and the rest of the
population,” said Lucas
Chancel, co-director of the World Inequality Lab and lead author of the new
report. “Yet, in rich countries, government intervention prevented a massive
rise in poverty—this was not the case in poor countries. This shows the
importance of social states in the fight against poverty.”
“If there is one
lesson to be learnt from the global investigation carried out in this report,”
he added, “it is that inequality is always a political choice.”…
India: extreme inequality in numbers
While India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it is also one of the most unequal countries. Inequality has been rising sharply for the last three decades. The richest have cornered a huge part of the wealth created through crony capitalism and inheritance.
They are getting richer at a much faster pace while the poor are still struggling to earn a minimum wage and access quality education and healthcare services, which continue to suffer from chronic under-investment. These widening gaps and rising inequalities affect women and children the most...
https://www.oxfam.org/en/india-extreme-inequality-numbers
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