Number of billionaires globally doubles since start of financial crisis

Since the financial crisis began, the number of billionaires worldwide has more than doubled, the charity, Oxfam, has revealed this week.

The richest 85 people have the same wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population – and their collective wealth has increased by $668 million per day between 2013 and 2014 - almost half a million dollars every minute.

Ireland is not immune to the effects of rising inequality Oxfam Ireland warned at the launch of its report Even It Up: Time to End Extreme Inequality.

According to the report, if the world's three richest people were to spend $1m every single day each, it would take each one of them around 200 years to exhaust all of their wealth.

This is not a rich country story; today there are 16 billionaires in Sub-Saharan Africa, alongside the 358 million people living there in extreme poverty, while in South Africa, inequality is now greater than it was at the end of apartheid.

The Oxfam report, endorsed by Graça Michel, Kofi Annan and Joseph Stiglitz among others^(6), is the opening salvo of a new Oxfam campaign, also called Even it Up, to push world leaders to turn rhetoric into reality and ensure the poorest people get a fairer deal. It calls for action to clamp down on tax dodging and says big global corporations and the world’s richest individuals must pay their fair share to governments’ coffers, so that countries can tackle inequality and build fairer societies.