Global growth continues to benefit the wealthiest, warns Oxfam, who says the wealth gap has continued to widen in 2017. In its Annual Report entitled "Rewarding Work, Not Wealth" and published this Monday, on the eve of the opening of the World Economic Forum (WEF) the British non-governmental organization launches, like last year, a call to the leaders of Davos who find themselves until Saturday in the chic resort of the Swiss Alps so that "the economy works for all and not only for a rich minority".

Poor people, but rich people, richer

Last year, 82% of the world's wealth was found in the pockets of the world's richest people, who make up 1% of the population, while the poorest half of humanity (3.7 billion people) has not received anything, says the organization that relies on various data (Forbes, Credit Suisse, World Bank, ILO ...) and on its own field surveys.

If the number of people living in extreme poverty has been halved in 20 years (between 1990 and 2010), and "continues to decline since then", wealth inequalities are nevertheless ever more striking and tend to increase, she continues. "Over the past decade, ordinary workers have seen their incomes rise by an average of 2 percent a year, while billionaires' wealth has increased 13 percent a year, almost six times faster," Oxfam said. "The number of billionaires last year saw its largest rise in history, with a new billionaire every other day" adds the association, for which this "billionaires boom is not the sign of a prosperous economy, but a symptom of the failure of the economic system. "

Workers "down the pyramid"

According to this study, it is women who are most affected by global inequalities. Women workers find themselves "at the bottom of the pyramid": they earn less than men and generally have less paid and more precarious forms of work, Oxfam denounces. The World Economic Forum has recently estimated that 217 years before women earn as much as men and have equal representation at the workplace.

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"In the same way, out of 10 new billionaires, 9 are men," says the NGO. according to the rich list of Forbes 2017, the five richest people on the planet are also men: Bill Gates from Microsoft, the businessman Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, Amancio Ortega, the founder of Inditex, and Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook.

Fight against tax evasion

For a more equitable distribution of wealth, Oxfam advocates for a living wage for all workers, for the elimination of the wage gap between men and women, and for stricter rules to crack down on tax evasion which, according to NGO, represents a shortfall of at least $ 170 billion each year "for developing countries.

In the absence of any reaction from the Davos leaders, this question of inequalities of wealth seems in any case to meet a favorable echo in public opinion. According to an Oxfam survey of 70,000 people in 10 countries (India, Nigeria, United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Morocco, the Netherlands and Denmark), two-thirds of respondents consider "urgent" to treat "the gap between rich and pauves".

(With agencies)