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World's richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030: Study

Saturday, 07 April 2018 3:22 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 07 April 2018 6:30 PM ]

Inequality, evident here in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Shutterstock)

The gap between the world’s super rich and other citizens is widening at an alarming rate and by 2030 the richest 1% will control two-thirds of the world’s wealth, according to an alarming analysis by Britain’s House of Commons.

In its shocking report, the UK House of Commons library said the top 1% of the world will hold 64% of the world’s wealth by 2030.

The Guardian reported that Danny Dorling, professor of geography at the University of Oxford, said the scenario in which the super-rich accumulated even more wealth by 2030 was a realistic one.

“Even if the income of the wealthiest people in the world stops rising dramatically in the future, their wealth will still grow for some time,” he said. “The last peak of income inequality was in 1913. We are near that again, but even if we reduce inequality now it will continue to grow for one to two more decades.”

The House of Commons research was commissioned by Liam Byrne, the former Labour cabinet minister, as part of a gathering of MPs, academics, business leaders, trade unions and civil society leaders focused on addressing the problem of wealth inequality.

George Freeman, the Tory MP and former head of the prime minister’s policy board, said: “While mankind has never seen such income inequality, it is also true that mankind has never experienced such rapid increases in living standards. Around the world billions of people are being lifted out of poverty at a pace never seen before. But the extraordinary concentration of global wealth today – fueled by the pace of technological innovation and globalization – poses serious challenges.”

The report urged world leaders to act as anger over inequality is reaching a ‘tipping point.’

In line with the recent report, in a separate study in January, Oxfom had also found that some 82% of money generated last year went to the richest 1% of the global population while the poorest half saw no increase at all.

The US plays a big role in the current situation. The three richest people in the United States have collectively more wealth than the bottom half of the US population, or 160 million Americans, highlighting the country’s extreme income disparity.

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have a combined fortune of $264 billion, the Institute for Policy Studies had said in a report, calling the growing wealth gap a “moral crisis” that “threatens our democracy."

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