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Contents
What is the News?
The World Inequality Report 2022 has been released.
About World Inequality Report 2022
The report has been produced by a team of world-leading economists. One of the co-authors is economist Thomas Piketty.
Purpose: The report is the most authoritative and comprehensive account available of global trends in inequality.
What are the key findings of the report?
Firstly, since the mid-1990s, the richest 1% captured 38% of wealth growth at the global level.
Secondly, the richest 10% own around 60-80% of wealth and the poorest half systematically own less than 5% of the wealth.
Thirdly, women, today, earn just one-third of all labour income in the world. This situation has increased since the 1990s but at a very slow rate. If we continue at this rate, the world needs to wait at least a century to reach gender parity.
What is the recommendation given by the report?
Governments should intervene to tackle inequality with social and tax policies.
Countries should introduce a progressive rate of wealth tax, with tax rates according to the value of the total amount of wealth owned.
Source: This post is based on the article “‘Top 1% captured over a third of wealth growth’: World Inequality Report” published in Indian Express on 2nd December 2021.
