The wealth divide between the super rich and the poor has grown exponentially over the last decades in , with the top 1% having grown their share of wealth by 62% between 2000 and 2023, according to a taskforce report published Tuesday.
The committee’s report, commissioned as part of South Africa’s G20 presidency, found that the richest 1% of the global population captured 41% of new wealth since the year 2000.
By contrast, the bottom 50% of humanity have increased their wealth by just 1%, the report said, using data from the World Inequality Lab.
In other words, the top 1% increased their average wealth by 2,655 times as much as the bottom 50%, the report said.
The taskforce recommended that a new panel on inequality should be modelled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It would be responsible for monitoring the causes and impacts of inequality, and providing insights to governments and policymakers.
Inequality undermines democracy and corrodes politics, study says
Authors of the report warned that countries with high inequality are likely to experience democratic decline.
“It isn’t just unfair and undermining societal cohesion – it’s a problem for our economy and our politics too,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who is famous for his work on global inequality.
Stiglitz headed the “Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality” commissioned by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa holds the presidency of the G20 bloc until November 2025, when it is due to .
What else did the report say?
The authors cited a “perfect storm” of global shocks like , the and trade disputes, for worsening poverty and inequality.
They noted that one in four people in the world regularly skip meals while billionaire wealth has hit the highest level in history.
Since 2020, global poverty reduction has slowed almost to a halt and reversed in some regions, and 2.3 billion people face moderate or severe food insecurity, up by 335 million since 2019.
Edited by: Rana Taha
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