History will likely remember the pandemic as the “first time since the beginning of data that inequality increased simultaneously in virtually every country on Earth.” That is the verdict of Oxfam’s inequality report for the year 2020 – a terrible year that has hit the poorest and hardest in the world.
Why it matters: The world’s poorest were already in a race against time and faced an existential risk in the form of global climate change. According to the World Bank, the coronavirus pandemic could reduce global poverty alleviation for as much as a full decade.
- The virus has exposed how work, health and education systems create additional disadvantages for low-income and minority families, while enabling the most affluent to recover quickly.
- A majority of nearly 300 economists from around the world surveyed by Oxfam said they expect the virus to reduce gender (56%), race (66%), wealth (78%) and income inequalities ( 87%) will worsen in their country.
In numbers: The number of people living on less than $ 1.90 a day increased by more than 400 million last year. That’s a larger number of people than the population of the United States.
- More than 3 billion people had no access to health care and three quarters of workers had no access to wages when sick. Meanwhile, the top 1% equity continued to rise.
How it works: In the United States, 22,000 Black and Latino Americans would still be alive today if their coronavirus death rates were the same as those of white people – due to unequal access to health care, disproportionate rates of pre-existing conditions, and other exacerbating disadvantages in communities of color as Axios has reported.
Yes but: While inequality within countries deteriorated in 2020, the world in general could have become less uneven. That’s because rich countries have generally been hit harder by the coronavirus than the poorest countries, which generally have a much younger population.
What to watch: School closures have affected approximately 1.7 billion children worldwide. But children in rich countries were able to continue their education online and were excluded from school for much less time – an average of about six weeks, compared to four months for children in the poorest countries. Millions of girls dropped out of school in 2020 and will never return.
It comes down to: As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said, “While we are all floating on the same sea, it is clear that some are in superyachts, while others are clinging to the floating debris.”