ISLAMABAD: Prominent economist Dr Kaiser Bengali on Monday said poverty was the result of an extreme inequality, not ‘low growth’, and like many parts of the world Pakistan too was facing sheer inequality that bred poverty.

“This situation in turn increases a sense of insecurity and injustice among the citizens who are living on the margins and eventually there is the rise of agony and anguish among them,” he added.

Dr Bengali was speaking at the launch of Oxfam’s report on global inequality “An economy for the 1 percent.” The report was jointly launched by Oxfam and the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) ahead of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.

According to Oxfam, the richest 62 individuals in the world owned as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet.

Dr Kaiser Bengali says Pakistan facing sheer inequality that breeds poverty

The wealth of those 62 individuals has risen by 44pc since 2010 while only nine of the 62 individuals are women.

The report said power and privilege was being used to skew the economic system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest. A global network of tax havens further enables the richest individuals to hide a combined wealth of $7.6 trillion.

The fight against poverty will not be won until the inequality crisis is tackled, the report added.

Giving a national context, Dr Bengali called for the need to creating opportunities for the poor so that they can earn their livelihood free of the control of the feudal-rural structures.

“Economic inequality is a product of social inequality,” said Dr Bengali, who is known for his reforms-based thinking.

He added that there was interpersonal and interregional inequality in Pakistan.

“The economic policies in Pakistan are killing jobs, they are helping in the concentration of wealth in fewer hands.” He said the solution lies in increasing the bargaining power of the people living in rural areas by giving them access to resources and industrial and economic activities as are provided to the people in urban areas.

Dr G.M Arif, Joint Director Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), highlighted the importance of growth and said almost one billion people had moved out of poverty in the last four decades due to growth which had influenced their standards of living.

He said the serious issue highlighted in the report was that most of the benefits of growth were going to the upper echelon.

“We see that labour income in Pakistan has declined over time, it is not due to productivity and growth but because the output is going either to CEOs or the top 1pc,” he added.

Senior economist Dr Pervaiz Tahir said in our country addressing inequality was not even on agenda or mapping plans.

“It is not considered as a problem,” he said and highlighted that poverty cannot be measured as even the economist do not seem to be serious over it.

Oxfam country director Arif Jabbar said the average annual income of the poorest 10pc people in the world had risen by less than $3 in almost a quarter of a century.

He said though world leaders had increasingly talked about the need to tackle inequality, the gap between the richest and the rest had widened dramatically in the last 12 months.

“Oxfam’s prediction made ahead of last year’s Davos that the 1pc would soon own more than the rest of us by 2016 actually came true in 2015, a year early,” he added.

Mr Jabbar said ‘Oxfam’ was calling for urgent action to tackle the inequality crisis and reverse the dramatic fall in wealth of the poorest half of the world.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2016