For more info go to www.therules.org The figure we use for total global household wealth, $223 trillion, comes from the 2012 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report . The figures we use for how the world’s wealth is divided by population cohort also come from the 2012 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, as discussed here . The video says that the richest 300 people on earth have more wealth than the poorest 3 billion. We chose those numbers because it makes for a clear and memorable comparison, but in truth the situation is even worse: the richest 200 people have about $2.7 trillion , which is more than the poorest 3.5 billion people, who have only $2.2 trillion combined. The claim that inequality between poor countries and rich countries has been increasing and now stands at about 1:80 comes from the United Nations Development Program’s 1999 Human Development Report . The amount of aid that rich countries give to developing countries each year, about $130 billion, comes from the OECD Aid Statistics report. The claim that corporations steal more than $900 billion from developing countries each year through tax avoidance comes from a 2012 report from Global Financial Integrity . The claim that developing countries pay $600 billion each year in debt service comes from the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics databank. The claim that developing countries lose about $500 billion each year as a consequence of trade rules imposed by rich countries (through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) comes from Robert Pollin’s 2003 book _Contours of Descent_ . Another important fact that the video doesn’t include has to do with land grabs. Fred Pearce’s new book, _The Land Grabbers_ , shows that that land exceeding the size of Western Europe has been grabbed from developing countries by rich-country corporations in the past decade alone. If we could quantify the value of that land we could have added a huge amount to the $2 trillion stack of cash that the video depicts flowing from poor to rich. It’s also worth drawing attention to a recent Oxfam report that shows that “The richest 1% has increased its income by 60% in the last 20 years, with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process.”
Links to /The Rules work and articles:
- A Guardian article about our campaign on the City of London: here
- An article by Greenpeace examining our Unga Tax campaign in Nairobi: here
- An article on our World Bank campaign: here
- An article on our /Crowdfunding tool: here
- An article on our last workshop in Nairobi: here
- An analysis of World Bank policy: here
- Our latest e-book, the One Party Planet: here
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