Billionaire wealth soars as 255 million of world's jobs lost in pandemic

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oxfam-billionaire-wealth-poverty/

By Aimee Picchi
Updated on: January 25, 2021 / 4:09 PM / MoneyWatch

 

The pandemic has worsened income inequality, with the world's richest people regaining their losses from COVID-19 shutdowns in nine months while the number of people living in poverty has doubled to more than 500 million, according to a new report from the anti-poverty group Oxfam.

Almost 9% of total working hours were lost last year when compared with the levels of employment at the end of 2019, before the pandemic shuttered the economy, according to a separate report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency. That's the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs lost across the globe, or about four times greater than the impact from the Great Recession of 2009, the analysis found.

The world's poorest could take a decade to regain their financial footing from the devastation wrought by the pandemic, according to the Oxfam study, which says the novel coronavirus has accelerated an ongoing trend toward widening income inequality. Oxfam's report was released to coincide with the World Economic Forum's Davos Agenda, set to take place online this year rather than its traditional gathering of global movers and shakers in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos.


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President Joe Biden has proposed a $1.9 trillion relief package, although it hasn't yet been taken up by Congress.

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Economists in 79 countries who were surveyed by Oxfam said they projected their countries would experience an "increase" to a "major increase" in income inequality due to the pandemic. The economists who were surveyed included Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, Jayati Ghosh of the at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley.

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"Women and marginalized racial and ethnic groups are bearing the brunt of this crisis. They are more likely to be pushed into poverty, more likely to go hungry, and more likely to be excluded from healthcare," Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International, said in the statement.

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