Relevance: GS-2: Issues relating to poverty, Inequality and hunger.

Key phrases: Inequality, Oxfam international, billionaires, wealth, pandemic, poverty,

Why in News?

• Ahead of the World Economic Forum's Davos Agenda, Oxfam International has released a report titled Inequality Kills which talks about how the wealth is accumulated among few persons and the rest of the people live under distress and poverty.

What is the “Inequality Kills” report?

• “Inequality Kills” The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID19” is a report released in January 2022 by Oxfam, a U.K based consortium of 21 charitable organisations that have a global presence.
• The report argues for sustained and immediate action to end the pandemic, address global inequality and initiate concerted measures to tackle the climate emergency.

Key highlights:

• The central argument of the report is that inequality is a death sentence for people that are marginalised by social and economic structures and removed from political decision making.
• A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began. The world’s 10 richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty. Meanwhile, an estimated 17 million people have died from COVID-19—a scale of loss not seen since the Second World War.
• The wealth of the 10 richest men has doubled, while the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off, because of COVID-19. The 10 richest men in the world own more than the bottom 3.1 billion people. If the 10 richest men spent a million dollars each a day, it would take them 414 years to spend their combined wealth.
• It identifies “vaccine apartheid” (unequal access to vaccines between countries) and the lack of universal vaccination programs in many countries as a cause of the emergence of multiple new strains of the coronavirus that has led to the continuation of the pandemic.
• It also demonstrates how emergency government expenditure (estimated at $16 trillion) that was meant to keep economies afloat during this crisis, inflated stock prices. This resulted in billionaires’ collective wealth increasing by $5 trillion during the pandemic.
• A 99% windfall tax on the COVID-19 wealth gains of the 10 richest men could pay to make enough vaccines for the entire world and fill financing gaps in climate measures, universal health and social protection, and efforts to address gender based violence in over 80 countries, while still leaving these men $8bn better off than they were before the pandemic.

How does the report propose to rectify global inequality?

The “Inequality Kills” report proposes far reaching changes to structures of government, economy and policymaking to fight inequality.

• It urgently asks for “vaccine recipes” to be made open source so that every qualified vaccine manufacturer can manufacture them. In doing so the report asks for monopolies over vaccines held by pharmaceutical giants and anchored in place through the World Trade Organisation, to end.
• The report then asks for governments to “claw” back the wealth from billionaires by administering solidarity taxes higher than 90% especially on the billionaires that have profited during and because of the pandemic.
• In addition to this, the report asks for permanent cancellation of tax havens, progressive taxation on corporations and an end to tax dodging by corporations.
• The report then suggests that all of this regained wealth be redirected towards building income safety nets, universalising healthcare for everyone, investing in green technologies and democratising them, and, investing in protecting women from violence.
• Finally, the report advocates for redistributing power along with wealth by strengthening workers’ unions, boosting political representation of marginalised groups, and asserting human rights.
• Change rules and shift power in the economy and society: Governments must rewrite the rules within their economies that create such colossal divides, and act to pre-distribute income, change laws, and redistribute power in decision-making and power in the economy.
• That includes ending sexist laws, including those which mean that nearly 3 billion women are legally prevented from having the same choice of jobs as men.
• It must include tackling the barriers to representation for women, racialized groups, and working-class people. Women still make up only 25.5% of parliamentarians globally.

Way Forward:

• To tackle the growing inequality, Oxfam believes an immediate requirement to start disaggregating more public statistics by income and introduce a regular collection of data on income and wealth inequality.
• Wealth from the super-rich should be redistributed to generate sources for the majority, and revenue should be generated to invest in the education and health of future generations.

Source: The Hindu 

Mains Question:

Q. Oxfam International has released a report titled Inequality Kills which talks about how the wealth is accumulated among few persons and the rest of the people live under distress and poverty. What are the key highlights of the report? What measures report has proposed against inequality prevailing in the world? Critically examine.