The gap between billionaires and the rest of the world has grown significantly in recent years. While poverty rates have remained relatively stagnant since 1990, billionaire wealth has increased three times faster than it did from 2023 to 2024. This growing inequality is a result of a system that allows most billionaire wealth to be taken rather than earned, with 60% coming from inheritance, cronyism, or monopoly power.
The global economy remains heavily influenced by colonial history, which has led to ongoing exploitation and wealth extraction from the Global South to benefit the wealthy elite in the Global North. The World Bank estimates that it will take more than a century for poverty rates to decline if current growth rates continue and inequality does not decrease.
Oxfam and Development Finance International’s findings suggest that negative trends in most countries since 2022 indicate a need for radical change. To address this, experts recommend reducing global and national goals on inequality, repairing historical colonialism through apologies and reparations, ending modern-day colonial systems, taxing the richest to end extreme wealth, promoting South-South cooperation and solidarity, and ending ongoing formal colonialism.
While there is still much work to be done, people’s movements fighting inequality and resisting colonialism offer hope for a more equal future. By standing in solidarity with those who fight for a world based on care and wellbeing for all, we can create a better economy that benefits everyone, not just the wealthy few.
Source: https://www.oxfam.org/en/takers-not-makers-unjust-poverty-and-unearned-wealth-colonialism