Johannesburg
– A new Oxfam report unto inequality has found that just 8 men own the same
wealth as half the world, while 3 billionaires in SA have the same
wealth as bottom 50 percent.
In the report,
released on Monday, the no-governmental agency said 8 men own the same wealth
as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.
The
report marks the annual meeting of political and business leaders in Davos.
The 47th
World Economic Forum Annual Meeting will be held in Davos-Klosters,
Switzerland, between 17-20 January under the theme “Responsive and Responsible
Leadership”.
Oxfam’s
report, ‘An economy for the 99 percent’, shows the gap between rich and poor is
greater than had been feared.
Read also: Inequality: Did Piketty get it wrong?
New and
better data on the distribution of global wealth – particularly in India and China
– indicates that the poorest half of the world has less wealth than had been
previously thought. Had this new data been available last year, it would
have shown that nine billionaires owned the same wealth as the poorest half of
the planet, and not 62, as Oxfam calculated at the time.
In South
Africa, the richest 1 percent of South Africans have 42 percent of the total
wealth. Three billionaires have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50
percent of South Africa, it says.
“Such
inequality is the sign of a broken economy, from global to local, and lack of
will from government to change the status quo,” said Oxfam SA Executive
Director Sipho Mthathi.