World Inequality Report 2022

Table of Contents

World Inequality Report 2022: Relevance

GS 2: Bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting India’s interests.

According to the World Inequality Report 2022 recently released by Paris-based World Inequality Lab, India is among the most unequal countries of the world.
Note: It is different from World Inequality Report 2022 published by Oxfam International.

The top 10% of Indian population earns 20 times more than the lower 50% of the population.
While the top 10% and top 1% hold respectively 57% and 22% of total national income, the share of the bottom 50% has gone down to 13%.
India stands out as a poor and very unequal country, with an affluent elite.

The richest 10% of the global population currently takes 52% of global income, whereas the poorest half of the population earns 8% of it.
While the poorest half of the global population possesses just 2% of the total wealth, the richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth.
Though inequality has increased within most countries, it has declined between countries over the past two decades.
MENA (Middle East and North Africa) is the most unequal region in the world, while Europe has the lowest inequality levels.
The gap between the incomes of the top 10% and the bottom 50% of the people within countries has almost doubled.

Emerging economies like China and India has experienced faster increase in private wealth than wealthy countries.
China, despite being a communist country, has had the largest increase in private wealth in recent decades.
In India, however, the private wealth has increased from 290% in 1980 to 560% in 2020.

In the last 40 years, countries have become richer while their governments have become poor. It means that the increase in national wealth is largely due to private wealth.
The share of wealth held by public sector is close to zero or negative in rich countries, which signifies that all the wealth is in private hands.
COVID-19 has only worsened the situation as the governments across the world has borrowed 10-20% of GDP from private sector.
The global billionaire wealth increased by more than 50% between 2019 and 2021.