New evaluation launched Thursday morning reveals the world’s 2,365 billionaires noticed their collective fortunes develop by $ 4 trillion throughout the coronavirus pandemic, a staggering windfall that has sparked calls for for a worldwide wealth tax geared toward lowering inequality and to fund key priorities such because the worldwide overdue immunization effort.

Performed by the Institute for Coverage Research (IPS) on behalf of the Patriotic Millionaires and Millionaires for Humanity, the brand new report attracts on knowledge from a number of sources to point out that the wealth of the planet’s billionaires has jumped by 54% in the midst of the worldwide Covid-19 disaster and the ensuing financial collapse.

“Their mixed wealth elevated from $ 8.04 trillion to $ 12.39 billion between March 18, 2020 and March 18, 2021,” the report notes. “Globally, the richest 20 billionaires have a mixed wealth of $ 1.83 trillion – with a rise of $ 742 billion, or 68%, within the 12 months of the pandemic. By comparability, Spain’s GDP in 2019 was $ 1.3 trillion. “

Chuck Collins, a researcher with the Inequality Program at IPS, stated in an announcement that the large billionaire wealth accrued throughout the pandemic “needs to be taxed to cowl the price of immunizing the world and lowering inequalities throughout the nation. the world economic system ”.

“Until we tax the world’s billionaires,” Collins warned, “the legacy of the pandemic can be an acceleration of concentrations of wealth and energy.”

If world billionaires had been required to pay an annual wealth levy on the mannequin of the ultra-millionaire tax proposed by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) – which supplies for a 2% tax on extra property of $ 50 million and a 3% tax on property over $ 1 billion – “they’d have paid round $ 345 billion in wealth taxes,” in keeping with IPS.

“The annual revenue from this wealth tax can be greater than double the estimated price of $ 141.2 billion for delivering Covid-19 vaccines to each individual on the planet,” the group notes, citing price estimates ( pdf) from Oxfam Worldwide.

As G20 finance ministers are resulting from meet subsequent week to debate the coronavirus-induced financial disaster and avenues for restoration, Patriotic Millionaires Chairman Morris Pearl has argued {that a} world tax on fortune was to be the order of the day.

“Taxing wealth have to be a key and central coverage for all governments if we’re to construct past the biased and defective financial system we had earlier than,” Pearl stated. “G20 finance ministers and worldwide monetary establishments should promote a restoration past regression to the identical outdated, the identical outdated. We have to tax the wealthy. “