The top 1 percent of people in the world are getting richer and will control more than half of all wealth by 2016, according to a report released by Oxfam Monday.
The British nonprofit antipoverty group reported in its annual study that 80 individuals on the Forbes list of billionaires controlled the same amount of wealth, $1.3 trillion, as the bottom 3.5 billion of all people in the world.
The relative wealth of the richest people in the world has been growing since 2010, when it took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the bottom half of the global population.
Now the top 1 percent is on the verge of having as much wealth as the bottom 99 percent combined, Oxfam finds. As of 2014, that elite group had 48 percent of total wealth, but its share is expected to inch upward over the next year.
Oxfam released the report to coincide with the meeting of elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The group decried lobbying on behalf of wealthy individuals and called for redistributive policies, such as a living wage and taxes on wealth.
Oxfam’s findings are taken from Forbes’ ranking of billionaires and a report on global wealth published by the research division of the Swiss bank Credit Suisse.
The bottom half of the wealth distribution includes many people with zero or negative wealth. In 2013, 70 million people had negative net worth, with a combined debt of nearly a trillion dollars, according to a Credit Suisse researcher.
That group includes student borrowers and new homeowners. Such debts are increasingly common, according to the latest Credit Suisse report.
That study also found that the number of millionaires in the U.S. is booming. The country minted 1.6 million new millionaires between 2013 and 2014, Credit Suisse found, an increase of 14 percent.
