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Unbelievable (but True) Income Inequality Statistics

The rising trend in income inequality worldwide is best shown by these insane statistics:

  • The 8 wealthiest people in the world OWN MORE WEALTH than 50% of the world’s population combined, that’s 3.75 billion people!!!
  • The 1% richest people today have MORE WEALTH than all the other 99% of the planet’s population.
  • The wealth of the bottom 50% dropped by 41% between 2010 and 2015, whereas the wealth of the richest 62 people increased by $500 billion to $1.76 trillion, which is half of the world’s wealth!!!
  • 1 in 9 people worldwide doesn’t have enough to eat and more than 1 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day.
  • The average wage of a CEO is 380 times bigger than the average employee wage.
  • The United States has the highest income inequality among western industrialized nations and 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Moreover, the top 0.1% of American households have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%.
  • America’s 4 wealthiest households own as much as the bottom 40% (128 million people!).
  • In USA, the share of wealth held by the top 3% rose from 44.8% in 1989 to 51.8% in 2007 and 54.4% in 2013, while the share held by the bottom 90% fell from 33.2% in 1989 to 24.7% in 2013.
  • In the past decade, income concentration returned to the levels of the 1920s and presently private capital in the hands of billionaires represents 9% of global GDP compared to 3% 20 years ago.
  • In India, the 15 richest people have more wealth than half of the Indian population, that’s 650 million people!
  • In Japan, the number of families with no savings grew from 5% in the 1980’s to 30% in 2016!
  • In the UK, 6.5 million households don’t have enough savings to last them for 1 month.
  • The annual increase in wealth of the richest 1,000 people in Britain (£28.508 billion) could pay 20 years’ worth of grocery bills for all of the UK’s users of food banks or it could pay a year’s rent for over 3 million households.
  • The richest 1% of Brazil’s population have the same household income as the bottom 50%, that’s almost 80 million Brazilians!
  • Russia is one of the most unequal major economies in the world, with 62% of its wealth being held by 127,000 millionaires and 26% by 77 billionaires! This means there’s only 12% of the country’s wealth left for all the rest of Russians.
  • The richest 20% of Romanians earn 8.3 times more than the poorest 20%.
  • According to the World Bank, Colombia has the highest income inequality in the world outside of Africa and is only surpassed by 9 African nations.
  • In China, more than one-third of all wealth is concentrated in the top 1 percent, while the majority of the population remains struggling despite strong economic growth.
  • Almost 60% of the bottom 20% youth population (aged 20–24 years) in sub-Sahara Africa have fewer than 4 years of schooling, whereas in the top 20% youth population only 15% youngsters are in this situation.

*Source: wowism.org

The new economic system of Wowism was born as a solution to the income inequality problem. In Wowism the majority of economic benefit is shared with the community and, in turn, each member of the community gives back and does good in the world.

Read more about Wowism here.