Oxfam revealed that almost two-thirds of the new wealth amassed since the start of the pandemic has gone to the richest 1%.

The charity said the best-off had pocketed $26tn (£21tn) in new wealth up to the end of 2021. That represented 63% of the total new wealth, with the rest going to the remaining 99% of people.

The report said that for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%in the past two years, each billionaire gained roughly $1.7m.

Despite small falls in 2022, the combined fortune of billionaires had increased by $2.7bn a day.

Oxfam said for the first time in a quarter of a century the rise in extreme wealth was being accompanied by an increase in extreme poverty.

Policies introduced to combat the economic impact of Covid 19 – such as cuts in interest rates and the money creation process known as quantitative easing – boosted the value of property and shares, which tend to be owned by the rich.

Oxfam said:

Food and energy companies had more than doubled their profits in 2022, paying out $257bn to wealthy shareholders at a time when more than 800 million people were going hungry.

Only 4 cents in every dollar of tax revenue came from wealth taxes, and half the world’s billionaires lived in countries with no inheritance tax on money they give to their children.

A tax of up to 5% on the world’s multimillionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7tn a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty, and fund a global plan to end hunger.

 The super-rich were also key contributors to the climate crisis, the charity added, with a billionaire emitting a million times more carbon than the average person. They were also twice as likely to invest in polluting industries, compared with the average investor.

Danny Sriskandarajah, the chief executive of Oxfam GB commented: 

“The current economic reality is an affront to basic human values. Extreme poverty is increasing for the first time in 25 years and close to a billion people are going hungry but for billionaires, every day is a bonanza. Multiple crises have pushed millions to the brink while our leaders fail to grasp the nettle – governments must stop acting for the vested interests of the few. How can we accept a system where the poorest people in many countries pay much higher tax rates than the super-rich?”

Call for new taxes on super-rich after 1% pocket two-thirds of all new wealth | Inequality | The Guardian

 According to a report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), more workers will be forced to accept lower quality and poorly paid jobs this year due to the global economic slowdown, according to a report from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

“The current slowdown means that many workers will have to accept lower quality jobs, often at very low pay, sometimes with insufficient hours”, the ILO’s 2023 World Employment and Social Outlook Trends report warned.

 ILO warned that “high and persistent” uncertainty over the state of the global economy was eroding real wages and pushing workers back into informal employment, which can involve street selling, domestic work or refuse-picking through landfills.

The slowdown will stall the previous rise in living standards for global workers who will have fewer opportunities available to them. 

“Progress in poverty reduction achieved over the previous decade has largely faltered and convergence in living standards and work quality is coming to a halt as productivity growth slows worldwide,” the report said.

The ILO said the ongoing shortage of better job opportunities was likely to worsen with the projected slowdown, “pushing workers into jobs of worse quality and depriving others of adequate social protection”.

The cost of living crisis, in which incomes have failed to keep up with rising inflation, is also pushing people into absolute or relative poverty across the world, the ILO explained. Price inflation was reducing demand for goods and services from low and middle-income countries, threatening employment and quality jobs.

The ILO said it does not expect the drop off in employment growth to be recovered until at least 2025, and raised further concerns over a projected slowdown in productivity, which it said was “essential for addressing the interlinked crises we face in purchasing power, ecological sustainability and human wellbeing”.

Global economic slowdown ‘to force more workers into poorly paid jobs’ | Global economy | The Guardian

 Oxfam has accused major food companies of “crisis profiteering” amid global economic upheaval. The organization asserted that food companies have used climate change, the surging cost of living, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to increase prices for consumers.

Food companies that have increased their profits as inflation surged should pay windfall taxes to help tackle global inequality, Oxfam said.

Oxfam analyzed 95 companies that posted windfall profits and found that most pass on these profits to shareholders while charging consumers higher prices.

Oxfam executive director Gabriela Bucher told the AP, “The number of billionaires is growing, and they’re getting richer, and also very large food and energy companies are making excessive profits.” 

“Pandemics, conflicts and not least the Russian war of aggression have set us back years in terms of poverty, hunger, health and education  —  while the rich have become even richer,” Germany’s Development Minister Svenja Schulze explained.

 At Davos, Oxfam calls for a windfall tax on food companies – DW – 01/16/2023

 An analysis which tracked all child deaths in England between 2019 and 2022, found overall mortality dipped during the pandemic due to a decrease in infectious illnesses, but that numbers of deaths have since returned to pre-pandemic levels. This included a 32% increase in trauma deaths and a 13% rise in sudden unexpected death in infancy or childhood (Sudic) last year compared with pre-pandemic rates.

Prof Karen Luyt, the programme lead for the National Child Mortality Database, based at the University of Bristol, said the figures could be “the first mortality signal” from families struggling with the cost of living crisis.

“This is worrying and I think we’re likely to see things getting worse,” she said. “Certainly for childhood illness and mortality, we know there’s a strong social gradient and we know that more families are now living in poverty.”

Of the children who died in the Sudic category, four times as many came from the most deprived fifth of the population, compared with the least deprived fifth.

Prof Monica Lakhanpaul, at University College London, who has studied the effects of homelessness on child health, said the link between child mortality and poverty was well-established and described the latest figures as a “tragic” result of worsening inequalities.

“The poorer the children, the higher the risk of mortality, but nothing’s been done,” she said. “We’re in a high-income country and this is on our doorstep…We talk about parental neglect a lot … but I see this as societal neglect.”

Child mortality from trauma and sudden death rising in England, study shows | Poverty | The Guardian

India’s top 1% owned more than 40.5% of its total wealth in 2021, according to Oxfam.

In 2022, the number of billionaires in the country increased to 166 from from 102 in 2020.

 Last year in the UK there were nearly 40,000 excess deaths – that is, deaths above a five-year average.

 In the last two weeks of 2022, deaths were a fifth higher than the average from 2016 to 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), and that’s taking into account factors such as a bigger, ageing population.

According to the Office for National Statistics, there have been about 170,000 excess deaths in England and Wales since the pandemic began. Most of these can be directly attributed to Covid-19 itself: after all, the virus’s name is scrawled on the death certificates of more than 212,000 UK citizens. Some of those who died may have been vulnerable or infirm, but in other circumstances years away from death. As the pandemic waned, we could have expected excess deaths to shift to below average levels over time. This has not happened.

By the beginning of last year, the number of deaths was similar to 2019. As the actuary Stuart McDonald points out, we had been through the worst of a pandemic in which many frail members of society died, and normally mortality falls year on year, so to only equal the death toll of 2019 was already indicative of a worrying trend.

There were about 2,200 additional deaths in England associated with A&E delays in December alone. Average ambulance response times in England are now the worst on record, and more than half of patients are waiting for more than four hours at A&E for the first time since records began in 2011.

Britain’s excess death rate is at a disastrous high – and the causes go far beyond Covid | Owen Jones | The Guardian

Australia’s wealthiest 1% are 61% richer than they were before the pandemic and have pocketed $150,000 a minute over the past decade, according to Oxfam Australia.

Australian data showed that a wealth tax of just 2% on the country’s millionaires with wealth over $7m, 3% on those with wealth over $67m, and 5% on billionaires would raise $29.1bn annually, enough to increase income support payments to the Henderson poverty line of $88 a day for 1.44 million people.

As of March 2021, 1.3 million Australians were receiving a jobseeker or youth allowance payment, worth $47.74 and $37.89 a day respectively. Yet just 42 individual Australians had a combined wealth of nearly $236bn.

 Australia Institute analysis released in July, argued that corporate profiteering was driving at least 50% of inflation in Australia, as well as in the US and Europe.

Australia’s richest 1% pocketed $150,000 a minute over past decade, Oxfam research finds | Tax | The Guardian

Tens of thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and in two other major cities on Saturday night, protesting  Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the legal system and weaken the Supreme Court. Critics say Netanyahu would cripple judicial independence, foster corruption, set back minority rights, and deprive Israel’s court system of credibility.

 Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered police to take tough action if protesters displayed Palestinian flags at Saturday’s protest. Social media footage showed a number of Palestinian flags on display in defiance. 

  Tunisian protests come 12 years to the day after the ousting of former autocrat, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and 14 January is seen by most Tunisians as the anniversary of the revolution and the start of what was called the Arab Spring. 

 President Kais Saied has usurped almost total power. In 2021, the president sacked the prime minister, suspended parliament and pushed through a constitution enshrining his one-man rule. The new constitution gave the head of state full executive control and supreme command of the army.

Saied shut down the elected parliament in 2021 but low turnout for December’s election of a new, mostly powerless, legislature revealed little public appetite for his changes.

 Only 8.8% of the roughly nine-million-strong electorate had voted in the parliamentary elections.

Tunisia: Thousands rally against President Saied – BBC News