210 OXFAM BRIEFING PAPER

SUMMARY

18 JANUARY 2016

Tondo slum in Manila, Philippines, 2014. Photo: Dewald Brand, Miran for Oxfam

AN ECONOMY FOR THE 1%
How privilege and power in the economy drive extreme
inequality and how this can be stopped
The global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes. The richest 1%
now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Power and
privilege is being used to skew the economic system to increase the
gap between the richest and the rest. A global network of tax havens
further enables the richest individuals to hide $7.6 trillion. The fight
against poverty will not be won until the inequality crisis is tackled.

www.oxfam.org

 SUMMARY: AN ECONOMY FOR THE 1%
The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes. Credit Suisse
recently revealed that the richest 1% have now accumulated more wealth
than the rest of the world put together.1 This occurred a year earlier than
Oxfam’s much-publicized prediction ahead of last year’s World Economic
Forum. Meanwhile, the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has
fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years. This is just the latest
evidence that today we live in a world with levels of inequality we may not
have seen for over a century.
‘An Economy for the 1%’2 looks at how this has happened, and why, as well
as setting out shocking new evidence of an inequality crisis that is out of
control.
Oxfam has calculated that:
• In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people –
the bottom half of humanity. This figure is down from 388 individuals as
recently as 2010.
• The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44% in the five years
since 2010 – that's an increase of more than half a trillion dollars
($542bn), to $1.76 trillion.
• Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars
in the same period – a drop of 41%.
• Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population
has received just 1% of the total increase in global wealth, while half of
that increase has gone to the top 1%.
• The average annual income of the poorest 10% of people in the world
has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century.
Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year.
Growing economic inequality is bad for us all – it undermines growth and
social cohesion. Yet the consequences for the world’s poorest people are
particularly severe.
Apologists for the status quo claim that concern about inequality is driven by
‘politics of envy’. They often cite the reduction in the number of people living
in extreme poverty as proof that inequality is not a major problem. But this is
to miss the point. As an organization that exists to tackle poverty, Oxfam is
unequivocal in welcoming the fantastic progress that has helped to halve
the number of people living below the extreme poverty line between 1990
and 2010. Yet had inequality within countries not grown during that period,
an extra 200 million people would have escaped poverty. That could have
risen to 700 million had poor people benefited more than the rich from
economic growth.

2

 a: 0
62 INDIVIDUALS  muou  TRILLION

Have the same wealth as The increase in wealth of The fall in wealth of the
the poorest 3.6 billion the richest 62 individuals poorest 3.6 billion people
people in the world since 2010 since 2010

63 130
1% 50% $3

Since 2000, the poorest The amount of the gicbai Rise in the average
half of the global population wealth increase since 2000 annual income of the

received only 1% of the received by the top 1% poorest 10% of people

increase in global wealth in the world

 

A child watches traffic in Manila, Philippines, 2014. Photo: Dewald Brand, Miran, for Oxfam

Figure: Global income growth that accrued to each decile 1988–2011: 46% of
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the total increase went to the top 10%
Global income growth that accrued to each decile 1988-2011
7,000

$ billion (2005 PPP)

6,000
5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000
1,000
1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Global income decile
Increase in income 1988-2011 $bn

Top 1%

There is no getting away from the fact that the big winners in our global
economy are those at the top. Our economic system is heavily skewed in
their favour, and arguably increasingly so. Far from trickling down, income
and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate. Once
there, an ever more elaborate system of tax havens and an industry of
wealth managers ensure that it stays there, far from the reach of ordinary
citizens and their governments. One recent estimate4 is that $7.6 trillion of
individual wealth – more than the combined gross domestic product (GDP)
of the UK and Germany – is currently held offshore.

$7.6 trillion of
individual wealth –
more than the
combined GDP of the
UK and Germany – is
currently held offshore.

Figure: The wealth of the richest 62 individuals continues to grow, while that
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of the poorest half of the world stagnates

Total wealth $bn (Current FX, Money of the Day)

3000

2500

2000

1500

1000

Wealth of richest 62
people (From Forbes, $bn)
500

0

4

Wealth of bottom 50%
($bn)

 Rising economic inequality also compounds existing inequalities. The
International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently found that countries with higher
income inequality also tend to have larger gaps between women and men
in terms of health, education, labour market participation, and
representation in institutions like parliaments.6 The gender pay gap was
also found to be higher in more unequal societies. It is worth noting that 53
of the world’s richest 62 people are men.
Oxfam has also recently demonstrated that while the poorest people live in
areas most vulnerable to climate change, the poorest half of the global
population are responsible for only around 10% of total global emissions.7
The average footprint of the richest 1% globally could be as much as 175
times that of the poorest 10%.
Instead of an economy that works for the prosperity of all, for future
generations, and for the planet, we have instead created an economy for
the 1%. So how has this happened, and why?
One of the key trends underlying this huge concentration of wealth and
incomes is the increasing return to capital versus labour. In almost all rich
countries and in most developing countries, the share of national income
going to workers has been falling. This means workers are capturing less
and less of the gains from growth. In contrast, the owners of capital have
seen their capital consistently grow (through interest payments, dividends,
or retained profits) faster than the rate the economy has been growing. Tax
avoidance by the owners of capital, and governments reducing taxes on
capital gains have further added to these returns. As Warren Buffett
famously said, he pays a lower rate of tax than anyone in his office –
including his cleaner and his secretary.

Myanmar garment workers travel home after their shift in Hlaing Thayar, an industrial zone in Yangon.
Photo: Dr Kaung Thet/Oxfam

Within the world of work, the gap between the average worker and those at
the top has been rapidly widening. While many workers have seen their
wages stagnate, there has been a huge increase in salaries for those at the
top. Oxfam’s experience with women workers around the world, from
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 Myanmar to Morocco, is that they are barely scraping by on poverty wages.
Women make up the majority of the world’s low-paid workers and are
concentrated in the most precarious jobs. Meanwhile, chief executive
salaries have rocketed. CEOs at the top US firms have seen their salaries
increase by more than half (by 54.3%) since 2009, while ordinary wages
have barely moved. The CEO of India’s top information technology firm
makes 416 times the salary of a typical employee there. Women hold just
24 of the CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies.
Figure: In the United States, pay rises for CEOs are far outstripping
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increases for average workers

1400%

Percentage change

1200%

997.2%

1000%
800%
600%

503.4%

400%
200%

10.9%

0%

1978 1982 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006 2010 2014
CEO pay

S&P 500

Typical worker pay

Across the global economy, in different sectors, firms and individuals often
use their power and position to capture economic gain for themselves.
Economic and policy changes over the past 30 years – including
deregulation, privatization, financial secrecy and globalization, especially of
finance – have supercharged the age-old ability of the rich and powerful to
use their position to further concentrate their wealth. This policy agenda has
been driven essentially by what George Soros called ‘market
fundamentalism’. It is this that lies at the heart of much of today’s inequality
crisis. As a result, the rewards enjoyed by the few are very often not
representative of efficient or fair returns.
A powerful example of an economic system that is rigged to work in the
interests of the powerful is the global spider’s web of tax havens and the
industry of tax avoidance, which has blossomed over recent decades. It has
been given intellectual legitimacy by the dominant market fundamentalist
world view that low taxes for rich individuals and companies are necessary
to spur economic growth and are somehow good news for us all. The
system is maintained by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professionals in
the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries.

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 It is the wealthiest individuals and companies – those who should be paying
the most tax – who can afford to use these services and this global
architecture to avoid paying what they owe. It also indirectly leads to
governments outside tax havens lowering taxes on businesses and on the
rich themselves in a relentless ‘race to the bottom’.
As taxes go unpaid due to widespread avoidance, government budgets feel
the pinch, which in turn leads to cuts in vital public services. It also means
governments increasingly rely on indirect taxation, like VAT, which falls
disproportionately on the poorest people. Tax avoidance is a problem that is
rapidly getting worse.
• Oxfam analysed 200 companies, including the world’s biggest and the
World Economic Forum’s strategic partners, and has found that 9 out of
10 companies analysed have a presence in at least one tax haven.
• In 2014, corporate investment in these tax havens was almost four times
bigger than it was in 2001.
This global system of tax avoidance is sucking the life out of welfare states
in the rich world. It also denies poor countries the resources they need to
tackle poverty, put children in school and prevent their citizens dying from
easily curable diseases.
Almost a third (30%) of rich Africans’ wealth – a total of $500bn – is held
offshore in tax havens. It is estimated that this costs African countries
$14bn a year in lost tax revenues. This is enough money to pay for
healthcare that could save the lives of 4 million children and employ enough
teachers to get every African child into school.
Tax avoidance has rightly been described by the International Bar
Association as an abuse of human rights9 and by the President of the World
Bank as ‘a form of corruption that hurts the poor’. There will be no end to the
inequality crisis until world leaders end the era of tax havens once and for all.
Companies working in oil, gas and other extractive industries are using their
economic power in many different ways to secure their dominant position.
This has a huge cost to the economy, and secures them profits far higher
than the value they add to the economy. They lobby to secure government
subsidies – tax breaks – to prevent the emergence of green alternatives. In
Brazil and Mexico, indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by
the destruction of their traditional lands when forests are eroded for mining
or intensive large-scale farming. When privatized – as happened in Russia
after the fall of communism for example – huge fortunes are generated
overnight for a small group of individuals.

Almost a third (30%)
of rich Africans’
wealth – a total of
$500bn – is held
offshore in tax
havens. It is
estimated that this
costs African
countries $14bn a
year in lost tax
revenues. This is
enough money to pay
for healthcare that
could save the lives of
4 million children and
employ enough
teachers to get every
African child into
school.

The financial sector has grown most rapidly in recent decades, and now
accounts for one in five billionaires. In this sector, the gap between salaries
and rewards, and actual value added to the economy is larger than in any
other. A recent study by the OECD10 showed that countries with oversized
financial sectors suffer from greater economic instability and higher
inequality. Certainly, the public debt crisis caused by the financial crisis,
bank bailouts and subsequent austerity policies has hurt the poorest people
the most. The banking sector remains at the heart of the tax haven system;

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 the majority of offshore wealth is managed by just 50 big banks.
In the garment sector, firms are consistently using their dominant position to
insist on poverty wages. Between 2001 and 2011, wages for garment
workers in most of the world’s 15 leading apparel-exporting countries fell in
real terms. The acceptability of paying women lower wages has been cited
as a key factor in increasing profitability. The world turned its attention to
the plight of workers in garment factories in Bangladesh in April 2013, when
1,134 workers were killed when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed. People
are losing their lives as companies seek to maximize profits by avoiding
necessary safety practices. Despite all the attention and rhetoric, buyers’
short-term financial interests still dominate activities in this sector, as
reports of inadequate fire and safety standards persist.
Figure: As jobs and productivity in the Chinese garment sector grows, real
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wages fail to keep up
1000
900

800
700
600

500
400
300
200

Labour productivity
Index
Real average
wage index

100
0

Inequality is also compounded by the power of companies to use monopoly
and intellectual property to skew the market in their favour, forcing out
competitors and driving up prices for ordinary people. Pharmaceutical
companies spent more than $228m in 2014 on lobbying in Washington.
When Thailand decided to issue a compulsory licence on a number of key
medicines – a provision that gives governments the flexibility to produce
drugs locally at a far lower price without the permission of the international
patent holder – pharma successfully lobbied the US government to put
Thailand on a list of countries that could be subject to trade sanctions.
All these are examples of how and why our current economic system – the
economy for the 1% – is broken. It is failing the majority of people, and
failing the planet. There is no dispute that today we are living through an
inequality crisis – on that, the IMF, the OECD, the Pope and many others
are all agreed. But the time has come to do something about it. Inequality is
not inevitable. The current system did not come about by accident; it is the
result of deliberate policy choices, of our leaders listening to the 1% and
their supporters rather than acting in the interests of the majority. It is time
to reject this broken economic model.

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 Our world is not short of wealth. It simply makes no economic sense – or
indeed moral sense – to have so much in the hands of so few. Oxfam
believes that humanity can do better than this, that we have the talent, the
technology and the imagination to build a much better world. We have the
chance to build a more human economy, where the interests of the majority
are put first. A world where there is decent work for all, where women and
men are equal, where tax havens are something people read about in
history books, and where the richest pay their fair share to support a society
that benefits everyone.

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 Oxfam is calling on leaders to take action to show they are on the side of
the majority, and to bring a halt to the inequality crisis. From living wages to
better regulation of the activities of the financial sector, there is plenty that
policy makers can do to end the economy for the 1% and start building a
human economy that benefits everyone:
• Pay workers a living wage and close the gap with executive
rewards: by increasing minimum wages towards living wages; with
transparency on pay ratios; and protecting workers’ rights to unionize
and strike.
• Promote women’s economic equality and women’s rights: by
providing compensation for unpaid care; ending the gender pay gap;
promoting equal inheritance and land rights for women; and improving
data collection to assess how women and girls are affected by economic
policy.
• Keep the influence of powerful elites in check: by building mandatory
public lobby registries and stronger rules on conflict of interest; ensuring
that good-quality information on administrative and budget processes is
made public and is free and easily accessible; reforming the regulatory
environment, particularly around transparency in government; separating
business from campaign financing; and introducing measures to close
revolving doors between big business and government.
• Change the global system for R&D and the pricing of medicines so
that everyone has access to appropriate and affordable medicines:
by negotiating a new global R&D treaty; increasing investment in
medicines, including in affordable generics; and excluding intellectual
property rules from trade agreements. Financing R&D must be delinked
from the pricing of medicines in order to break companies’ monopolies,
ensuring proper financing of R&D for needed therapy and affordability of
resulting products.
• Share the tax burden fairly to level the playing field: by shifting the
tax burden away from labour and consumption and towards wealth,
capital and income from these assets; increasing transparency on tax
incentives; and introducing national wealth taxes.
• Use progressive public spending to tackle inequality: by prioritizing
policies, practice and spending that increase financing for free public
health and education to fight poverty and inequality at a national level.
Refrain from implementing unproven and unworkable market reforms to
public health and education systems, and expand public sector rather
than private sector delivery of essential services.
As a priority, Oxfam is calling on all world leaders to agree a global
approach to end the era of tax havens.
World leaders need to commit to a more effective approach to ending tax
havens and harmful tax regimes, including non-preferential regimes. It is
time to put an end to the race to the bottom in general corporate taxation.
Ultimately, all governments – including developing countries on an equal
footing – must agree to create a global tax body that includes all
governments with the objective of ensuring that national tax systems do not
have negative global implications.

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 NOTES
1

Credit Suisse (2015) ‘Global Wealth Databook 2015’. Total net wealth at constant
exchange rate (USD billion). http://publications.creditsuisse.com/tasks/render/file/index.cfm?fileid=C26E3824-E868-56E0CCA04D4BB9B9ADD5

2

D. Hardoon, R. Fuentes-Nieva and S. Ayele (2016) ‘An Economy for the 1%: How privilege
and power in the economy drive extreme inequality and how this can be stopped’, Oxfam,
http://oxf.am/ZniS

3

Source: Oxfam calculations based on Lakner-Milanovic World Panel Income Distribution
(LM-WPID) database (2013). Created for C. Lakner and B. Milanovic (2013) ‘Global Income
Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, World Bank. Data for
2011 provided through personal correspondence with B. Milanovic, September 2015.

4

G. Zucman (2014) ‘Taxing Across Borders: Tracking Personal Wealth and Corporate
Profits’, Journal of Economic Perspectives. http://gabrielzucman.eu/files/Zucman2014JEP.pdf

5

Source: Oxfam calculations from data sources : wealth of the bottom 50% from Credit
Suisse, ‘Global Wealth Databook 2015’; data on the net wealth of the richest 62 individuals
from Forbes’ annual list of billionaires.

6

C. Gonzales, S. Jain-Chandra, K. Kochhar, M. Newiak and T. Zeinullayev (2015) ‘Catalyst
for Change: Empowering Women and Tackling Income Inequality’. IMF.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1520.pdf

7

T. Gore (2015) ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality: Why the Paris climate deal must put the
poorest, lowest emitting and most vulnerable people first’, Oxfam, http://oxf.am/Ze4e

8

Source: Reproduced from L. Mishel and A. Davis (2015) ‘CEO Pay Has Grown 90 Times
Faster than Typical Worker Pay Since 1978’. EPI. http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-payhas-grown-90-times-faster-than-typical-worker-pay-since-1978

9

M. Cohn (2013) ‘Tax Avoidance Seen as a Human Rights Violation’, Accounting Today.
http://www.accountingtoday.com/news/Tax-Avoidance-Human-Rights-Violation-683121.html

10 OECD (2012) ‘OECD Employment Outlook 2012’, OECD Publishing. Chapter 3, ‘Labour
losing to capital: what explains the declining labour share?’.
http://www.oecd.org/els/employmentoutlook-previouseditions.htm
11 Chart reproduced from M-H. Lim (2014), ‘Globalization, Export-Led Growth and Inequality,
The East Asian Story’, South Centre. http://www.southcentre.int/wpcontent/uploads/2014/11/RP57_Globalisation-Export-led-Growth-and-Inequality-rev_EN.pdf

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 © Oxfam International January 2016
The paper on which this summary is based was written by Deborah Hardoon, Sophia Ayele and
Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva. This summary was written by Max Lawson. Oxfam would like to thank
Branko Milanovic for providing 2011 LM-WPID data and Branko Milanovic and Maro Lilla for
helpful comments on the global income shares methodology. The authors would also like to
thank Tony Shorrocks for providing source data for the 2014 Global Wealth Databook and for
valuable insights related to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report methodology. Thanks are also
due to Anna Coryndon for excellent editorial advice and Ana Arendar, Jaime Atienza and Katy
Wright for helping to manage the project. Contributions to the analysis have come from across the
Oxfam confederation including from Jon Slater, Francesca Rhodes, Rachel Wilshaw, Mohga
Kamal Yanni, Uwe Gneiting, Alison Holder, Claire Godfrey and Susana Ruiz.
‘An Economy For the 1%’ is part of a series of Oxfam papers written to inform public debate on
development and humanitarian policy issues.
For further information on the issues raised in this paper please e-mail
advocacy@oxfaminternational.org
This publication is copyright but the text may be used free of charge for the purposes of
advocacy, campaigning, education, and research, provided that the source is acknowledged in
full. The copyright holder requests that all such use be registered with them for impact
assessment purposes. For copying in any other circumstances, or for re-use in other publications,
or for translation or adaptation, permission must be secured and a fee may be charged. E-mail
policyandpractice@oxfam.org.uk
The information in this publication is correct at the time of going to press.
Published by Oxfam GB for Oxfam International under ISBN 978-1-78077-992-8 in January 2016.
Oxfam GB, Oxfam House, John Smith Drive, Cowley, Oxford, OX4 2JY, UK.

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