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At the same time, the crisis has caused an intensification of poverty among those who were already struggling before the pandemic. Inequalities are therefore still widening more than ever, says the latest Oxfam report on inequalities in the world, which is released on Monday, January 17.
There is a new billionaire every 26 hours in the world. All the data compiled in this report shows an unprecedented enrichment of the wealthiest.
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This was made possible by the pandemic and the public money paid by governments and the central bank. This is explained by Quentin Parinello, spokesperson for Oxfam France.
« If we look at France, billionaires have increased their fortune by 236 billion euros during the crisis and we can see that it is not thanks to the economic activity of the companies in which they have shares but because there has been unprecedented public support in response to the crisis, notably by injecting these hundreds of billions of euros into the financial markets. »
Less than a hundred days before the presidential election in France, the NGO Oxfam is therefore calling for policies to fight against inequality to be put back at the center of candidate programs.
« If we look at history, we see very clear cases where when the right policies are adopted, that is to say much stronger funding for public services and much stronger social protection, we can sustainably tackle the inequality. They are not inevitable, they are the result of political choices. It is by financing more protective social models, by financing them through progressive taxes, that we will be able to fight inequalities in the long term. »
Under Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term, the richest 1% saw their new life increase by an average of 2.8%.
Worldwide, the world’s top 10 billionaires see their fortunes double. It’s just unprecedented, and it’s again thanks to public intervention, in all these countries, which has largely benefited the billionaires. On the African continent, safety nets were much weaker than in some countries […] A whole section of the population was much more precarious because these safety nets did not exist. We still see today that the rebound in terms of economic health is much stronger in the developed countries than in the countries of the African continent and it is also unfortunately a question of access to vaccines.
Quentin Parinello, spokesperson for Oxfam France. The situation in Africa and in the world
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