What could a wealth tax on world’s richest 1% buy?

The world’s richest 26 people now own as much as the poorest 50%, according to a report from Oxfam which has called attention to the growing global wealth divide.

The charity’s annual wealth check, released to mark the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, has found the number of billionaires worldwide now stands at a record 2,208 - nearly double a decade ago when the financial crisis hit.

Over the past twelve months, collectively they have seen their wealth grow by $2.5 billion a day, an increase of 12%, while the poorest half of the world’s population has seen its net worth fall by 11% over the same period.

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In a sign wealth distribution is becoming even more stratified, since 2016 the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population has more than halved from 61 to just 26.

Oxfam’s director of campaigns and policy, Matthew Spencer, has warned that rising inequality risks jeopardising the huge strides made to tackle global poverty over the past quarter of a century.

“The way our economies are organised means wealth is increasingly and unfairly concentrated among a privileged few while millions of people are barely subsisting,” he says.

The charity has backed calls for a global wealth tax; the profits of which would then be used to fund high-quality universal public services such as education and healthcare.

According to Forbes, the world’s wealthiest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has a $112 billion fortune. Just 1% of his total wealth is roughly equivalent to the health budget of Ethiopia, a country with a population of 105 million people.

The Guardian says a global wealth tax of 0.5% on the world’s richest 1% would raise an estimated $418bn (£325bn) a year, “enough to educate every child not in school and provide healthcare that would prevent 3 million deaths”.

Oxfam’s report has been criticised in the past because of the way it calculates wealth and its “conclusion that wealth should be redistributed through taxation, [is] a measure that many would politically and personally oppose”, says Quartz.

Yet in a sign the political headwinds may be changing, CNN Business says that its findings “echo policy positions embraced by the newly empowered Democrats in the United States, who are advocating for similar reforms”.

“There is going to be a broader and increasingly energised public conversation in the US and globally on what a fair and effective tax system looks like that will be very different from today,” says Paul O'Brien, Oxfam America's vice president of policy and advocacy.

Newly elected Democratic Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proposed taxing the wealthy as high as 70% to fund a climate change plan she is pushing called the “Green New Deal”.

Meanwhile, Democratic presidential hopefuls Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have also called for higher taxation to fund programmes such as Medicare for All, which would expand the number of Americans with health insurance.

But many analysts also stress that in recent decades the share of the world population living in poverty – surviving on less than $2 a day – has fallen sharply from 44% in 1980 to 9.6% in 2015 according to World Bank data.

“This is largely due to economic growth in large poor countries such as China and India as they have opened themselves up to global commerce,” says The Independent.

Its approach might have flaws says Quartz, but “Oxfam’s calculation is done to make a shocking point, and its point still stands, whether or not you nit-pick at this methodological compromise”.