Global billionaires last year enjoyed the steepest increase in their share of wealth since the World Inequality Lab began keeping records in 1995, according to the research group’s analysis released Tuesday. Their net worth grew by more than $3.6 trillion in 2020 alone, boosting their share of global household wealth to 3.5%.
“The Covid crisis has exacerbated inequalities between the very wealthy and the rest of the population,” said Lucas Chancel, the report’s lead author and lab’s co-director. “Yet, in rich countries, government intervention prevented a massive rise in poverty, this was not the case in poor countries.”
The World Inequality Report is based on more than four years of work by more than 100 researchers around the globe. Longtime inequality experts Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both at the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, coordinated the report with Chancel.
“The work that we’ve been doing really shows that, in fact, these claims — or this idea of trickle-down economics — does not pass the scrutiny of data,” Chancel said. “Key lessons from the past 40 years of data is that the cuts in top tax rates have not triggered prosperity for all, as they were supposed to trigger.”
Here are five more findings of the report:
Global wealth and income gaps are huge
The richest 10% of the global population controls 76% of the world’s wealth in 2021, according to the analysis. By contrast, the bottom 50% owns a mere 2%. The middle 40%, meanwhile, owns 22%.
When it comes to income, the top 10% captures 52% of global income, while the bottom 50% earns only 8%. The middle 40% makes 39%.
The rich are getting even wealthier
The top 1% captured 38% of global wealth growth between 1995 and…
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