OXFAM ISSUE BRIEFING JANUARY 2015
www.oxfam.org
WEALTH: HAVING IT ALL AND WANTING MORE
Global wealth is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a small wealthy elite. These wealthy individuals have generated and sustained their vast riches through their interests and activities in a few important economic sectors, including finance and pharmaceuticals/healthcare. Companies from these sectors spend millions of dollars every year on lobbying to create a policy environment that protects and enhances their interests further. The most prolific lobbying activities in the US are on budget and tax issues; public resources that should be directed to benefit the whole population, rather than reflect the interests of powerful lobbyists.
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1 GLOBAL WEALTH IS INCREASINGLY BEING CONCENTRATED IN THE HANDS OF A SMALL WEALTHY ELITE
Global wealth is becoming increasing concentrated among a small wealthy elite. Data from Credit Suisse shows that since 2010, the richest 1% of adults in the world have been increasing their share of total global wealth. Figure 1 shows that 2010 marks an inflection point in the share of global wealth going to this group.
Figure 1: Share of global wealth of the top 1% and bottom 99% respectively; Credit Suisse data available 2000
–
2014.
In 2014, the richest 1% of people in the world owned 48% of global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 99% of adults on the planet.
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Almost all of that 52% is owned by those included in the richest 20%, leaving just 5.5% for the remaining 80% of people in the world. If this trend continues of an increasing wealth share to the richest, the top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people in just two years, as shown on Figure 2, with the wealth share of the top 1% exceeding 50% by 2016.
Figure 2: Share of global wealth of the top 1% and bottom 99% respectively; the dashed lines project the 2010
–
2014 trend. By 2016, the top 1% will have more than 50% of total global wealth.
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% S h a r e g l o b a l w e a l t h
Bottom 99%Top 1%
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% S h a r e g l o b a l w e a l t h
Top 1%Bottom 99%
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The very richest of the top 1%, the billionaires on the Forbes list,
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have seen their wealth accumulate even faster over this period. In 2010, the richest 80 people in the world had a net wealth of $1.3tn. By 2014, the 80 people who top the Forbes rich list had a collective wealth of $1.9tn; an increase of $600bn in just 4 years, or 50% in nominal terms. Meanwhile, between 2002 and 2010 the total wealth of the poorest half of the world in current US$ had been increasing more or less at the same rate as that of billionaires; however since 2010, it has been decreasing over this time.
Figure 3: Wealth of the 80 richest people
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in the world has doubled
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in nominal terms between 2009 and 2014, while the wealth of the bottom 50% is lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.
The wealth of these 80 individuals is now the same as that owned by the bottom 50% of the global population, such that 3.5 billion people share between them the same amount of wealth as that of these extremely wealthy 80 people.
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As the wealth of everyone else has not been increasing at the same rate as that for the top 80, the share of total wealth owned by this group has increased and the gap between the very rich and everyone else has also been increasing. As a result, the number of billionaires who have the same amount of wealth as that of the bottom half of the planet has declined rapidly over the past five years. In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to equal the wealth of the bottom half of the world
‟s
population; by 2014, the figure had fallen to just 80 billionaires (see Figure 4).
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10001500200025003000
T o t a l w e a l t h $ b n ( C u r r e n t F X ,
M o n e y o f t h e D a y )
Wealth of bottom 50% ($bn)Wealth of richest 80 people (From Forbes, $bn)
80 people now have the same wealth as the bottom half of
the world’s
population, down from 388 in 2010