Billionaires like Tesla’s
TSLA,
Elon Musk and Amazon’s
AMZN,
Jeff Bezos saw their share of global wealth spike during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the 2022 World Inequality Report, billionaires throughout the world owned 1% of global wealth in 1995, and now own over 3% of global wealth. That jump was “exacerbated during the COVID pandemic,” the study says.
“2020 marked the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record,” the report adds.
The world’s wealthiest 1% took 38% of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, compared with the bottom 50%, which accumulated just 2% of it.
The report details income and wealth inequalities within economic groups and by gender, but it didn’t group people by race or other classifications.
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Female workers have seen their share of global earnings increase over the past 30 years, but the progress has been slow. Today, women make up about 35% of total global earnings, compared with 30% in 1990.
China was the only place featured in the 2022 World Inequality Report where women’s share of total labor income actually dropped since 1990.
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The full 236-page report comes out as news of the omicron variant that causes the coronavirus appears to be less severe than originally thought, causing market surges this December.
