the accounts of the 722 big Corriere.it

The spotlight is still on the extra profits of large companies, which especially in recent years have created a heated debate regarding the disparities between those who, in an increasingly complex economic and geopolitical context, were getting richer and richer riding the crisis, and those who were fighting for make ends meet at the end of the month or, even worse, for survival. According to the new analysis by Oxfam and ActionAid, which surveyed the companies in Forbes’ Global 2000 list, over the past two years (the extra profits made in 2021-2222 have in fact been evaluated) among the largest companies in the world they have made, on average, “almost 1,000 billion dollars of extra profits a year”, while the prices of consumer goods, food and energy “they skyrocketed” along with interest rates, “with a devastating impact on the cost of living for billions of people around the world”. The two international organizations estimate that a tax on the extra profits of multinationals at a rate of between 50% and 90% could bring into the public coffers between 543 and 978 billion dollars for 2021 and between 430 and 774 billion dollars for 2022.

Taking into consideration the various sectors of the economy, the analysis highlights how 45 energy companies averaged $237 billion a year in excess profit over the reporting period. “If governments had taxed 90% of the extra profits made by fossil fuel operators and passed on to wealthy shareholders, they would have had enough resources to increase global investment in renewable energy by 31%,” Oxfam and ActionAid point out. “Today, on the contrary, there are 96 billionaires in the world who have built their fortunes thanks to fossil fuels and can boast a total assets of almost 432 billion dollars (50 billion more than in April last year),” they say. present.

Me tooand multinationals in the food sector, banks, major pharmaceutical companies and major retailers have seen their positions improve during the inflation crisis, which has seen 250 million people driven to hunger in 58 countries, explain Oxfam and ActionAid again. In the food and beverage sector, 18 giants made, on average, over 14 billion dollars a year in extra profits in the two-year period 2021-2022. A figure equivalent “to more than twice the funding gap of 6.4 billion dollars essential to deal with the terrible food crisis which in East Africa – between Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan – risks causing 1 every person to die of hunger 28 seconds in the coming months, also in the face of the drastic increase of over 14% in the prices of food products globally in 2022», the two NGOs always explain. In the pharmaceutical sector, 28 large companies totaled 47 billion dollars a year in extra profits, while 42 large retailers and supermarket chains reported excess earnings of $28 billion annually, on average in 2021-2022. Furthermore, nine of the largest aerospace and defense companies have made $8 billion a year in excess profits on average over the last two years, while 9,000 people die of hunger every day, largely due to conflicts and wars.