Wealth: 62 richest people in the world as wealthy as half the global population

The wealth of the richest one percent of the world surpassed the wealth of the remaining 99 percent last year, a year earlier than predicted, the British non-governmental organization Oxfam announced on Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, reports the Patria news agency.

"The gap between the richest layer and the rest of the population has widened spectacularly in the last 12 months," reads the report by the non-governmental organization titled "An Economy for the 1%", published ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) which begins on Wednesday in Davos.

"Last year, Oxfam predicted that the richest one percent of the population would own more than the rest of the world by 2016. That prediction has already come true in 2015, a year earlier," the report states.

To illustrate the spectacular deepening of inequality in recent years, the non-governmental organization calculated that "62 people own as much as the poorest half of the world's population," while "that number was 388 five years ago."

According to Oxfam, "since the beginning of the 21st century, the poorest half of humanity has benefited from less than one percent of the total increase in global wealth, while the richest one percent has taken half of that increase."

Mark Goldring, head of Oxfam in Great Britain, points out that such inequality is unacceptable.

"It is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world's population owns no more than a handful of the richest people in the world. That group of super-rich people could fit on one bus.

The concern of world leaders about the growing crisis of inequality has so far not led to concrete action that would ensure the poorer half of the population feels the benefits of economic growth. In a world where one in nine people goes to bed hungry every night, we cannot afford to continue giving more and more to the richest," Goldring points out, as reported by The Guardian, via Index.