 Ladies and gentlemen, hello, welcome to this session. Hello and welcome to our online audience. We're here today together to talk about the cost of living crisis, important topic, of course, that you've been touching through different sessions here in Davos. But we will try and go into the facts and then the solutions, maybe, with our panelists. And thank you. Thank you. I will present them in a few seconds. Over the course of the pandemic, close to 100 million people are estimated to have fallen in extreme poverty. These people add two populations who are already in that state of extreme poverty before the pandemic. Now, of course, the war in Ukraine is bringing high disruptions and the price of food and fuel are creating a new issue in terms of cost of living crisis. At the same time, of course, the wealth of the world's richest people has doubled. And we will have the contribution of our director of Oxfam here. She will talk of that, of course. So what steps can be taken to tackle this inequality within countries and also on an international level? That's what we will try to talk about. With me today, I am pleased to introduce Mr. Vam Katatorian, president of Armenia. As well, we have Mrs. Gabrela Mucher, executive director of Oxfam International, Mr. Akim Steiner, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, and Amit Shtibe, his founder and director of Vital Capital Environment. And that's an impact investment fund in Cyprus. We will have about 30 minutes, and then we can take some questions and interact with you. So if you do have questions, please keep them and make a sign afterwards. I'd be happy to give the floor and the microphone to you. So let's jump into this topic. And I would start with you, Gabrela Mucher. Oxfam, yesterday you published your report as you usually do. And so if I read the figures that you gave, you said with this title, a pandemic creates a new billionaire every 30 hours, and a million people could fall into extreme poverty at the same rate in 2022 every 33 hours. So you expect this year that 263 million more people will crash into extreme poverty. Can you tell us more about those figures and the facts that you bring out with your reports? Yes, thank you very much. And I'm great to be here to be talking about this cost of living crisis, which is the name of our panel. But yes, it's definitely an inequality crisis. And our report that we published yesterday as Oxfam profiting from pain, as you said, emphasizes the extreme rise in billionaire wealth during the pandemic. So it's 24 months. And we've never seen this level of accumulation. And at the same time, at the other end of the scale, we are seeing, unfortunately, such a large number. These World Bank figures of extreme poverty that we've also added a factor of inequality, which is a projection, of course. We will always, at the end of the year, find out how, unfortunately, how many people in the end crash into extreme poverty. But our projection is 263 million, which is unprecedented levels because of the rising inequality and now, of course, we have the impact of the food crisis, the hunger crisis. And we know 193 million people are in severe hunger conditions. And with so many impacted also now by climate change, we have a series of crisis that are building on each other. And the moment when we definitely need to think differently and act differently. And this is why we're here at the World Economic Forum speaking about measures that we can take and how we need to act with urgency in the face of so much suffering. And so much, in fact, in the end, this is causing deaths. And six weeks ago, I was in Somalia witnessing firsthand what is happening there in terms of the hunger crisis. The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in over 40 years, compounded by this crisis of climate. And inflation plus the war in Ukraine, the cost of food, it's all imported. So all these situations are creating the fact that one person is dying in the Horn of Africa every 48 seconds. And if this were the only thing happening in the world, we will probably all be focusing on that instead of all the other crisis. So I want to bring attention to that and say, it's cost of living. Yes, but beyond that, it's actually we're talking about survival crisis and we need action. And one example of what a company can do, we projected if Walmart, which has focused so much on shareholder impact for themselves, could change their approach. And instead of paying $16 billion to their shareholders, they were to increase wages for their 1.6 million workers by $10,000 each. They would each benefit 1.6 million people. But in fact, that company changing their approach would reduce inequality in the US. And imagine if they did that along their supply chain. So the supply chain is along throughout the world. So we're talking about fair wages, living wages, companies can have an impact on as a matter of decision. Thank you. We'll come back to the actions afterwards. But thank you very much for touching already that issue. Mr. Steiner, unprecedented levels and also these inequalities, so this poverty, but also inequalities, can you build on that? How can you consider and qualify the situation today if you compare it historically? Well, let me pick up where Gabriella left off. I think this understanding that we are more and more clearly able to discern both from the empirical, the research on poverty and its intersection with inequality, I think, is extremely important, particularly in our world of today. Because we are in a different place than we were 100 years ago, where if there was a drought, there was no global world food program or there was no Oxfam. I mean, essentially, you either were able to become part of a diaspora or you would simply either survive, barely, or die. And I think that absolute level of poverty, which is then compounded by a natural disaster, on that front, we have made quite a lot of progress over the last 100 years. And I think even as we speak today, there's roughly 100 million people who are currently receiving some form of food aid simply because they find themselves as refugees or displaced by natural disaster. It's the humanitarian system that the world has built up is a significant safety net. But what it does not deal with, ultimately, is that poverty combined with inequality is actually increasingly a driver also of poverty and all that we associate with it. Let me just give you an example. We're living through an extraordinary moment where food prices are exploding, energy prices are exploding. If you take an average household income on the African continent, this is a very average figure. On average, an African household will spend 40% of their income on food. Now, imagine a poor household. It's probably 70%, 80% of its income. Any increase in price fundamentally affects that household differently to somebody who has a job, who has some savings, who is able to, in a sense, weather this particular moment. If it's food and fuel put together, which is the two basic things that you often rely on, whether it's for electricity or kerosene or the price for transport to work with your taxis, you see an immediate multiplier taking place. So I think it's extremely important that we do look at this issue of inequality very clearly because it's actually become a major additional factor in explaining poverty in our time. Secondly, multidimensional poverty. UNDP, many of us who work in the field of poverty eradication have for many years advocated to move beyond this notion that per capita income best captures what poverty is about. It's why UNDP 30 years ago started developing the Human Development Index with the Human Development Report. In fact, in Oxford, there is a research center there with whom we work very closely together, you probably as well, on this issue of the multidimensional poverty concept. Understanding that poverty, as Armatiasen also pointed out, is not just the absence of physical goods or income. It is essentially about being able to fulfill human capabilities, to have agency, to exercise choices in your life. And I think a lot of what is beginning to preoccupy me and many others at this moment is that we have, and this is my point about the historical trend, we have a larger and larger number of people in this world who define themselves essentially by recognizing their society as being unfair. And this has nothing to do with per capita income. It's unfairness at a higher level of per capita income, but a feeling of unjustness, of being deprived of opportunities. And think back to before the pandemic. We were actually struggling worldwide with inequality already. We had riots, political reactions, political radicalization in the United States, in Hong Kong, in Chile, in Paris. This was a phenomenon that I think has a lot to do with how poverty, inequality, and some of the phenomena you have described, Gabriella, essentially erode social cohesion and ultimately a society's belief or confidence in its own development pathway or how those who exercise power on our behalf essentially decide. So this moment right now is an awful moment because we are being hit by already a great deal of tension within our society. It's a pandemic on top, which has increased by 100 million plus. And now you're going to see just in the next few months, as Gabriella pointed out, many more people finding themselves below the poverty line. And let me add one last appeal also. In part, it is also in the way that we as an international community react or are not responding to this. Humanitarian support alone cannot alleviate poverty worldwide. Afghanistan, Syria, the unresolved conflicts in which the international community opts not to look beyond a kind of lifeline approach of a drip, we actually become part of making the problem of poverty worse. Syria today has more than 95% of its people living below the poverty line. Afghanistan is an economic freefall and by the middle or end of this year, 95% of Afghans will be living below the poverty line. This is a systemic failure of many different factors. Thank you. I see you nodding. So this is the occasion to say also that we are going to have a translation because you are going to talk in Armenia. Yes, I agree. So you can all take your, I guess, all of us translation. Thank you for that. And so I would like to ask you to tell us about your country based on this first introduction, how are things today and how is the situation in Armenia after the pandemic and the war now? Could you tell us a little bit about the situation? Thank you very much. I prepare speaking Armenian, but it's very easy, Mia. For me, explaining my language is something philosophical idea, my personality, because I'm a lecturer and I'm an economist, my main professional and I have a lot of chance ask something about my students, about poverty, about a role of international organizations. But now it's a time, ask you something, see it with you. Thank you very much. Yes, Shahrun Akim Paranjtanyeli Mitka. It's okay for you? It's okay for you? Yes, it's good. Iraq is a country that has been in Afghanistan and Syria for many years, we should be very careful. Channel one, yeah. And I think that we are very much familiar with the language of the people from the Lava region. But the people from the Lava region have been very familiar with our people. And I think we are going to have to wait for the next two weeks to see how democratic people are going to be able to participate. I think we should think about what we should do next. But I think the people who have been with us for many years are going to be in the same situation. We will be in the same situation, we will be in Lough, we will be in the same situation, we will be in the same situation, we will be in different situations, And we will be led by the president of the U.S. President of the U.S. We are really proud of this, because it is the most important thing. We cannot force ourselves to do this. We are very proud that they are making the most of the KKK and they are the largest KKK people in the world. We are proud that the KKK is the biggest KKK person in Afghanistan. The truth is that we have a strong team. This is something that I would like to point out, because it is a place where our children live, and where we have a lot of work to do in the future, and our children, our children. But we have children, where we have to take care of our children. Very few children live in this country. Our children have a lot of work to do in the future. They have a lot of dynamic work to do. In the central part of the country, we have a lot of authority to take care of our children. We have a lot of work to do in the future. We take care of our children. We have a lot of work to do in the future, and we have a lot of work to do in the future. But the ones we choose for the future are the people who have the right to take care of their children. I would like to point out that we are in Turkey and Azerbaijan. We have a lot of work to do in the future in the Arab countries, where we are in a conflict with Azerbaijan. We have to take care of the children. They said they didn't know we were going to become patriots. I'm sure that the four-year patriots were in the army, but they didn't know that they were going to be patriots. Their voices were very strong. We were only going to become patriots. We were only going to become patriots. But our hope was not to get away from the toward. The reason I am here is because of the lack of support from the public. Our people are not working as it is possible to make a living. The Ministry is not giving support to the public. If I am prepared to discuss this issue and the conversation between the government We had a lot of problems in the history of the war and we had to fight for the country. But we fought for the country, the country had no barriers. We had a strong military power. We had the same problems as in the year 2008 and the year 2020. We had many problems in the country, but we had to fight for the country with the same problems and we had to fight for the country. I'm going to go back to where I was born. And when I was born, I was a military general. In 2010, I was a commander in the General Assembly. I worked as a military battalion officer. I was a consultant for the other battalions. I was a business volunteer. I was a general volunteer. We've been working on a number of projects to help them get out of the government. For example, the government of Pakistan, which is a regional organization, which is the primary center for the arts. And I think that this is almost the last two or three years. We have worked on projects that have been discussed by the public. But we already discussed the laws. It's not about the fighting. We have our own values. It's about the people of our country. We are not the ones who are fighting for our rights. We are the ones that are concerned about corruption. But it's not like we are the ones who are working for the government. This is a long time ago. I have been working in the government for a long time. It is very difficult to understand. And there are many other countries where I work. We are not able to find people like that. We have to find the solution. And we have to find a way to solve it. And we can't find people like that. This is a difficult job for people. I was on the top of the top of the list, but there were conflicts. I think the people of that group were worried. I think they were worried. The people who were in the top of the list were worried that we would destroy the government. I think that the government would destroy the government. The government was not able to do that. They had to take a look at the situation in the state first and then the government was able to fix it. I'm not a masnakist, I'm a bolurtser agrarian. I'm not a zoovahana, I'm a husker. I'm a masnakamportite, I'm a masnakamportite. I'm a first-time host of the Mikic Avedin Erkan. I'm the new crisis manager. I'm the first to have a crisis manager. I'm the first to have a crisis manager. I think it's very important for the people to understand what is going on in Yerevan. and the transport of the electricity, the fuel supply, and the transportation of the 11 million people and the number of people who have been in the city for a long time and the number of people who have been in the city for a long time. But the government has been making a lot of money in gas, energy and electricity. But, four days after the attack, within the team, we were attacked. We were attacked by the Japanese, to prevent the attack from taking place, and we were forced to leave the camp. We were forced to leave, Thank you very much. So you gave us a great description about the importance of the political conditions, and I guess we can come back to that afterwards, but I first would like to give the floor to Mr. Stibbe about the infrastructure. You mentioned this issue also, and you have been working as an investor through your impact fund on this issue. Can you give us a few examples of actions that can help really to reduce poverty and also inequalities? Thank you, Madeline. I'm happy to be here in the forum. Yes, in the past 10 years and vital, we've been investing and developing and addressing actually these basic needs in high-growth countries, meaning food, meaning water, meaning health, sustainable infrastructure. Using technologies, for example, to I think to solve these problems of high-growth countries that are behind and the gaps that are only growing, we have to connect our values to our investments. And for the past 10 years, we are from the beginning an impact investment fund. Impact means intentional, positive impact. The goal of the investment is to do impact as well as market rate and risk-adjusted profits. And I think today in the situation in the world, we don't have the privilege not to do 100% investments according to our values and to measure it. And there was a Steiner said the SDGs gave us a good framework of measuring and a good framework of work. So I think in everything we do, we address that. I can give a few examples. First of all, seeing India dry up and due to climate change and due to the population growing, we built a company called Vitaly Environment to address to make sure that thousands of villages get safe water and together with the Indian government who has really large schemes of irrigation schemes to use the water very wisely and efficiently and give farmers the ability to have more than one season a year, India is the scarcity of water is completely crazy and in 2019 Chennai 10 million people run out of water and trains start bringing water inside the city. So it's a great need to manage the water situation in a very holistic way. We have a good, I personally based in Israel, we have a good example Israel is a scarce water area and we needed to solve it during the years. So non-revenue water in Israel is extremely low, it's only 5% less and we recycle all the agriculture in the country basically is recycled water, we recycle 85% of the sewage. So everything is planned very wisely and it's a nice pilot for the world and the high-growth countries that are now beginning to build infrastructure that will, things that we're trying to, there another example in agriculture is building agro-processing centers near the farmers in Africa making the basically transferring knowledge to the farmers around the center. They are the farmers bringing again from Israel a bit the Moshev concept, community farming, having the infrastructure, the heavy machinery or the processing centers owned by the community or owned by us as a private entity and we give credit of inputs and then trade with the farmers and we can show great results of 8x on the farmers income and farmers around the center income is higher eight times but a normal farmer in the country. We have other examples of technologies that can help putting communities, African communities most on big projects under the World Bank that we're doing of digitizing land ownership basically giving people an asset, their first asset they can take loans on, they can take mortgage that it basically puts them on the map of the economy of the global economy. So addressing these basic needs is what we do and... Yes, thank you. Mr. Steiner in the previous session this morning you mentioned the climate and digitization were either a threat or an opportunity and we have nice examples here. Can you maybe build on that and tell us how it can be used indeed to go into the right direction? Well put very briefly on top of all the conditions that all my three panelists have just described, we also looked because with UNDP we also tried to think very much about what is the future of development whole because decisions taken today in part determine how resilient a society and economy will be tomorrow. So much of the focus particularly when it comes to the UNDP's human development reports has been to try and understand what is it that countries can do about this and I'm sure we're going to speak more about this and interesting in 2019 the human development report when it looked at inequality and how it was evolving it also looked at the contemporary drivers and the two that it identified that had the greatest relevance to what would happen to inequality turned out to be digitalization and climate change. And interesting are both of them holding within them the seeds of either making it much worse i.e. an amplifier of inequality or if you want the opposite reducing inequality. And I think part of this applies as much to inequality as it does to poverty and so we have spoken about a lot of the phenomenon of poverty. I think present you alluded to it governance becomes a fundamental way in which you can tackle poverty the symptoms you describe Gabriella in part are the products of choices to act not to act of certain policies of whether we tax or do not tax how we tax you know a fossil fuel subsidy I mean we have this fascinating debate again right now I mean sometimes you do wonder whether we have a learn anything. You know here we are with $120 a barrel oil price and what happens we start debating again how we can bring the price down for a liter of gasoline at the petrol pump. This is the most inefficient any economist I hope you will agree with me inefficient instrument that you can think of in terms of actually dealing with what is clearly a very disruptive increase in the cost of living the theme of our panel. But we have learned over years first of all by subsidizing fossil fuel consumption it's a regressive subsidy I the richest who are the largest consumers proportionately get the most money so if you want to help the poor you're really spending your money badly secondly you're actually encouraging climate change to continue which will again harm the poor more badly. So governance policies are crucial in the way we apply them. But digital is an illustration also of what has in a sense become a realm of possibility e-government we spoke about it yesterday can be a very significant way in first of all delivering services to citizens at much lower cost some here many governments are extremely interesting because they are very constrained in their budgets but it also opens up a whole new realm of for example inclusive finance if you want to combat poverty remember in many countries until recently if you were poor the banking system simply did not want to know about you you had no collateral you had no address you had no credit history don't come to our branch. I live for ten years in Kenya I lived alongside the you know emergence of what is called impesa some of you may have heard about it an extraordinary revolution that interesting enough of digital payment platforms ultimately was allowed to succeed because the central bank governor at the time decided that a phone company service provider would be allowed to have financial I mean basically money in their accounts overnight because normally that's you know regulatory rules banks can only do that. The central bank in it took a deliberate decision to allow this to happen and a revolution followed where you know women today young people can transact at virtually no cost in the financial system they are part of it. You can actually borrow money in the morning to buy your produce on the wholesale market take it to your local market sell it and repay your loan all on the cell phone. This is the revolution that digital technologies can provide so I think we have many solutions they begin with the kind of society we choose to be our taxation system often is an expression of that and it is then very deliberate poverty eradication inequality reducing policies that look at life from the vantage point of a poor person rather than the rich person who is simply concerned about how do I avoid these people starting to go out on the streets and maybe rioting it is a slightly caricatured way but unfortunately our poverty discussions sometimes are very much characterized by who we are and where we live in a moment like this. Thank you we will have a few minutes for questions if you yes please. Thank you so much I'm Alexis Taylor I'm a global shaper from Austin Texas in the US and one of my questions is around the global wealth tax there's been more people calling for that as a potential solution to start addressing inequality and I'm wondering if we had a global wealth tax today and we had that funding where should it be spent and are redistributed to have the most impact on the challenges that we are talking about in the session. Thank you very much thank you Alexis for asking that question because I would have wanted to go into the sex and as I building on what the panelists have said you know these are questions of political will of choice and its inequality is not inevitable and we have multiple examples here so taxing is one of them and wealth taxation can be also a choice in per country rather than waiting for a global wealth taxation agreement like the one we've had for corporate taxation so starting and we calculated in our reports for taxation at two percent for individual wealth going up to five percent for billionaires so looking at raising with those small percentages we can raise 2.5 trillion dollars which would be enough to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty deliver universal health care and social protection for everyone living in low and lower middle income countries so nearly half the world and that's what we can do with those low percentages if we have the political will that's calculating if all countries did it at that level at the same time which is totally doable and given the the scale of the crisis but it requires of course social dialogue and agreements and transparency and many elements thank you Mr. President Thank you very much. in the I'm sure the people in the government will be very proud of it. We have done a lot of things. And I think we have a few things that we need to do together. One of the things we need to do is to be able to do it ourselves. We have a lot of things to do together. I think we can do it in an innovative way. I think we can do it in a way that we can do it in a more innovative way. I think we're going to have a lot of problems with inflation. The biggest problem is that we can't solve it. We have COVID-19 cases, and we're going to have to pay for it. The US has a million-dollar bill, the European Union has a million-dollar bill. We can't solve inflation with money. We can't do that. We can't do this, but it's our responsibility to provide the necessary information to prevent the spread of infections and the spread of diseases. We must use our resources to help people with COVID-19. We must do this, with our workers. We must do it, because we have the right to do it. Yes, please. Can we have another question here? Thank you very much. My name is Ndidi Okon Komuneli. I'm a social entrepreneur working in the food and agricultural landscape in Africa. And thank you for your comments and for your work. I have one comment and one question. The comment is, I've started an initiative after working for 25 years called Changing Narratives Africa, because it really makes me very sad when we paint the picture of Africa as a hungry child because it's a single story. So I'm just appealing to my brothers and sisters on the stage and be careful about the narratives you paint because when we do try to change them, we're often seen as actors who don't have agency and who can deliver impact in our own backyard. So it's just a nuanced and I'll be happy to talk offline. Now the question is, a lot of sessions I've gone to is around how can we help with relief, there's an emerging food crisis, and I'm curious whether any of you have seen studies that measure the impact of interventions. It's post-relief because oftentimes it distorts the local food ecosystem and actually makes prices rise for the rest of the population and drives them into poverty. And I'm getting very concerned about some of the interventions I'm hearing being touted around in the global arena. So that's one question I'll have for you. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Maybe Mr. Shiba, you could start on that one. I know you want to measure the impact of your actions. And we do. We do measure the outcomes and the outputs of everything we do. We can show that our, for example, we pulled tree in Angola. We built an agro-processing center that did 20% of the production. We know to say that 60% of the eggs sold went to the lowest part of the pyramid. So we do measure that. We do measure our beneficiaries. Who is the beneficiary? And we do. And we can show that results in everything we do. One comment on tax. I'm sorry, I didn't have a chance earlier. From my point of view, as the developer investor in the field, I'm always for more resources. But I think also when institutional resources need to understand, they need to take more risk as they see it now. Because if they won't take more, it's actually more risky not to invest in these places. And if COVID taught us something that solving problems in developing countries is solving problems also for the world and where everything is connected. I think that collect more taxes is good, but make it efficient, as you said, and let people on ground, and take risks on people on ground. Because my bottleneck is funding, and I don't think that... That's one example for that. Taking more risk with the taxes and with the institutional money we have. A few more examples of measurement. Do you want to address that? Yes. Can I respond? I agree very much with your issue of the single story. When I was in Somalia, as I said, six weeks ago, I met lots of entrepreneurs and a huge dynamic scene. At the same time, I feel it's more important to express the suffering that is there and the need for solidarity. But the investment, and we also launched a report last week called Dangerous Delays. The point is to prevent and save the children in Oxfam together, publish that report. And we know how to do it, and we have done it together with very much local organizations that are very well placed to do it themselves, but it's a partnership. So that is the types of investments we all want to do. The taxation that I was talking about is new wealth taxation. So at the moment of all the taxation in the world, only 4% is wealth taxation. And so we're of individuals. And that is an untapped resource in all countries, including even Somalia, which may be one of the poorest, but everywhere there is inequality and there's possibility of wealth taxation. So it's a question of decisions by countries, and it's not to be imposed in any way, but it's an opportunity given the situation in which we are, and then of course other measures to help address in the urgency. We need to think long term, as has been discussed, but also now what do people need, like eliminating VAT on food, because we need to make sure that people can access, and those, you know, VAT is not a progressive measure. So we need to have progressive taxation, which in itself reduces inequality. Thank you very much. I'm afraid we are out of time. It went very quickly. Very big issues, of course, and we see that there's still some discussions about the solutions, of course, but I will quote one of you saying it all begins with the societies we choose to be. So thank you very much for your participation and have a nice evening. Thank you. Thank you.