Oxfam blasts 'decade of division' as top five billionaires double wealth

Anti-poverty group Oxfam has lambasted the global business elite for encouraging widening inequality and says the combined fortune of the world's five richest men has more than doubled since the COVID pandemic.

Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar told CGTN that the world needed to be "re-energized" at the expense of private finance.

As the world's global business elite gathered at Davos to rub shoulders with global leaders, Oxfam called on Monday for governments to rein in corporate power by breaking up monopolies. It also called for the introduction of taxes on excess profit and wealth, with the promotion of alternatives to shareholder control such as forms of employee ownership.

Behar, speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, told CGTN: "This is a decade of division in which the top five billionaires have doubled their wealth, while five billion people, which is almost 60 percent of the global population, have become poorer."

The inflation-adjusted surge in wealth of the top five billionaires was driven by strong gains in the assets of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, LVMH chief Bernard Arnault, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and investor Warren Buffett.

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Behar revealed that Oxfam believes we will see the appearance of the first trillionaire within the next decade. 

"Billionaires now are working with enormous corporate and monopoly power, which means they're able to control the economy completely," he said. "They can change policies, they can change the economic systems and essentially make the whole system further rigged to get more and more profits at the top."

Behar said this was happening by the rich "dodging taxes and squeezing workers" while failing to invest in green technologies, at the same time as privatizing basic public services. 

The Oxfam report found that a billionaire is now either running, or is the main shareholder of, seven out of 10 of the world's biggest companies.

Meanwhile, nearly 800 million workers saw their wages over the past two years fail to keep up with inflation, resulting on average in the equivalent of 25 days of lost annual income per worker, according to Oxfam's analysis.

Of the world's 1,600 largest corporations, just 0.4 percent of them have publicly committed to paying workers a living wage and to supporting a living wage in their value chains, the study found.

The report estimated that 148 top corporations made $1.8 trillion in profits, 52 percent up on a three-year average, allowing hefty pay-outs to shareholders even as millions of workers faced a cost of living crisis as inflation led to wage cuts in real terms.

According to Behar: "We do have very tangible ways of changing the situation. We are recommending three particular steps. The first is to re-energize the state which must invest in public services like education, health, and drinking water. Investment in public services has been one of the best drivers of an equal society."

Oxfam's second recommendation is to "rein in the corporates as needed, to break monopolies and ensure that living wages are paid to the entire supply chain. There must be no tax dodging, and therefore there should be even greater taxation on wealth and further investment in public services."

He added: "The third step, which is also very critical for the World Economic Forum, is to reimagine capitalism and look at the entire spectrum of stakeholders. Mother Earth is a stakeholder. So is the supply chain worker and the agriculture worker who's giving you the produce. We need to change the way we look at businesses. "

Oxfam said its report was based on data sources ranging from the International Labour Organization and World Bank to the Forbes annual rich list.

Interview by Evangelo Sipsas of CGTN.

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