A new World Inequality Report warns that fewer than 60,000 of the world’s richest people — enough to fill a football stadium — own more wealth than half of the entire world put together.
The report highlights extreme gaps in income and wealth, which translate into the unequal distribution of political power, with a global elite amounting to 0.001% of the population being three times wealthier than the bottom 50%.
In stark contrast to their wealth and power, the top tier “contributes disproportionately little to public finances. Effective tax rates climb for most of the population but fall sharply for billionaires and centi-millionaire”.
To put that in context, middle-class workers on a high professional salary such as doctors, teachers, and engineers pay a higher share of their income in tax than a billionaire whose wealth is based on offshore structures or capital gains.
“This not only undermines tax justice; it deprives societies of the resources needed for education, healthcare, and climate action,” the report continued.
Women do more work, men pocket more pay
While humanity may be working fewer hours overall, men have benefitted most from the reductions in formal work, while women’s total workload remains high.
“This uneven distribution of time is one of the clearest demonstrations that progress in labour conditions has not automatically translated into gender parity,” the report states.
If hours worked reveal one dimension of inequality, labour income shares provide another. This data shows how much of the total earnings generated by labour in a country or region go to women, and how this share has changed over time.
“Despite progress, women remain far from achieving parity in all regions of the world. Globally, women earn just about one-third of total labour income today… no region in the world has reached a 50–50 balance between men and women,” it continued.
The gaps are particularly pronounced in South Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa, where women have less than a quarter of all the labour income.
Blame company owners, not people, for climate change
The unequal contribution of rich and poor countries to climate change is one of the most striking manifestations of global inequality.
At the international level, the average carbon footprint of the top 10% income group in the United States — measured by emissions linked to their consumption — is more than forty times greater than that of the top 10% in countries like Nigeria.
A person in the global top 1% income group emits, on average, around seventy-five times more carbon per year than someone in the bottom 50%.
Most emission estimates traditionally attribute greenhouse gases to the final consumers of goods and services.
“This ‘consumption-based’ approach highlights differences in lifestyle and consumption patterns. However, it overlooks another critical dimension of responsibility: capital ownership,” the report highlighted.
Ordinary people cannot easily change what they buy — their budgets are tight, they do not have all the information needed to make the right decisions, or they simply might not have greener options available.
By contrast, the people who own factories, energy companies, and other big assets choose where money gets invested, and they personally profit when high-pollution industries do well.
“An ownership-based approach, therefore, assigns emissions from production to those who own the corresponding capital stock. Under this framework, an individual owning 50% of a company’s equity is attributed 50% of that firm’s emissions, whether directly or via intermediaries such as investment funds,” the report argued.
In France, Germany, and the United States, the carbon footprint of the wealthiest 10% is three to five times higher when private ownership–based emissions are included.
In the United States, the top 10% accounts for 24% of consumption-based emissions but 72% of ownership-based emissions.
At the global scale, the contrast is even sharper. The top 1% accounts for 41% of all greenhouse gas emissions under ownership-based accounting, compared with 15% under the consumption approach.
Fortune favours the…politically powerful?
The report argues that the international monetary and financial system is structurally set up to favour rich countries and drain resources from poorer ones.
“A privileged few countries have the advantage of borrowing cheaply and investing in relatively more profitable assets… this advantage was first described in the 1960s as the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the United States,” the report explained, highlighting that it was not the result of “singularly skilful investments, but of the central role of the dollar”.
New evidence shows this is no longer just a US quirk.
Europe, Japan, and other advanced economies now enjoy a similar kind of deal, while emerging and low-income countries are in the opposite position. This involves paying high interest on their debts, holding low-yield reserves, and transferring income abroad every year.
The richest 20% of countries systematically record positive “excess yields” on their foreign positions, equivalent to around 1% of their combined GDP.
The bottom 80% of countries, by contrast, are persistent net debtors and face negative excess yields of about 2% of their GDP. In some poorer regions, the money flowing out in net income payments to richer countries can exceed what governments spend on health.
This means that global finance acts like a quiet, ongoing tax on poorer countries’ development and funds that could go into schools, hospitals, or infrastructure are instead used to service wealthy countries’ assets.
Crucially, the report argues this pattern is not the natural outcome of free markets but the result of political and institutional design.
Taken together, the report concludes that the current global system reproduces inequality between countries in a way that echoes, in a subtler form, older patterns of colonial extraction.