Billionaires adding $2.7 billion a day globally

- Billionaires hold two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trn created since 2020

- It's almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of world's population

- During past decade, the richest 1% captured around half of all new wealth

Davos: The richest one per cent have bagged nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world population put together over the past two years, a new report said on Monday. In its annual inequality report released on the first day of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting here, rights group Oxfam further said that billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7 billion a day even as at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages. Releasing the report on the sidelines of the annual congregation of the global elite in this Swiss ski resort town, Oxfam said a tax of up to five per cent on the world's multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty.

The report, titled 'Survival of the Richest', further said the richest one per cent have grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 per cent of the world's population. During the past decade, the richest one per cent had captured around half of all new wealth, it added, while noting that extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years.

"While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams. Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires," said Oxfam International Director Gabriela Bucher.

"Taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today's overlapping crises. It's time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow 'trickling down' to everyone else. Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships — just the superyachts," she added.

During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 per cent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest one per cent, while $16 trillion (37 per cent) went to the rest of the world put together, according to the Oxfam study. A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 per cent, it added. Billionaire fortunes have increased by $2.7 billion a day, which comes on top of a decade of historic gains -- the number and wealth of billionaires having doubled over the last ten years, Oxfam said. It said that the calculations are based on the most up-to-date and comprehensive data sources available, while figures on the richest people have come from the Forbes billionaire list. It alleged that billionaire wealth surged in 2022 with rapidly rising food and energy profits, as 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits last year. "They made $306 billion in windfall profits, and paid out $257 billion (84 per cent) of that to rich shareholders," it added.

It cited examples of the Walton dynasty, which owns half of Walmart, receiving $8.5 billion over the last year and Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, owner of major energy corporations, seeing his wealth soar by $42 billion (46 per cent) in 2022 alone.