Oxfam Report with the theme: “The Inequality Virus’ to be published today, Monday being the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Davos Agenda’ has revealed that the number of people living on less than $5.50 a day could have increased by between more than 200 million to half a billion in 2020.
The report also states that the poorest people in almost every country have seen their income fall due to the pandemic.
It said more than two-thirds of the people newly forced into poverty will be in South Asia and in East Asia and the Pacific as it is estimated that in 2020, 40 million people there stood to lose their jobs, and 52 million more were likely to become poor.
“What the virus has laid bare is the brutal precarity of the livelihoods of most of humanity. In normal times, the majority of people scrape by on incomes only just above the poverty line. Globally, 56% of the population live on between $2 and $10 a day. In low- and middle-income countries, over half of workers are in working poverty. They work without labour protections or access to unemployment benefits or support. This means that they rapidly face hunger when their income disappears.
A press release in commemoration of the World Economic Forum meeting said the report shows that COVID-19 has the potential to increase economic inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began over a century ago.
It said rising inequality means it could take at least 14 times longer for the number of people living in poverty to return to pre-pandemic levels than it took for the fortunes of the top 1,000, mostly White male, billionaires to bounce back.
@A new global survey of 295 economists from 79 countries, commissioned by Oxfam, reveals that 87% of respondents, including Jeffrey Sachs, Jayati Ghosh and Gabriel Zucman, expect an ‘increase’ or a ‘major increase’ in income inequality in their country as a result of the pandemic.
Oxfam’s report shows also how the rigged economic system is enabling a super-rich elite to amass wealth in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression while billions of people are struggling to make ends meet. It reveals how the pandemic is deepening long-standing economic, racial and gender divides.”