English By Dale Gavlak Share on Facebook
AMMAN - The COVID-19 pandemic is inflaming an already severe crisis of inequality across the globe, according to a report released by aid group Oxfam International. Lebanon, now ravaged by economic, political and health crises, must enact drastic reforms in order to survive, economists say.
Lebanon has the third-highest debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio in the world and is in need of extensive economic restructuring, Nasser Saidi, former minister of economy and trade in Lebanon, recently told the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center. If you look at other countries that have been in crisis Greece, Argentina, Iceland this goes well beyond that, he said. We are seeing real GDP declining in 2020 by about 20 percent. It had already declined by 7 percent in 2019. So, this is a massive depression, even greater than that in the 1930s, in the Great Depression.
Picture: AFP/File/Said Khatib
Wealth tax has always been a contentious issue in the country, even as South African wealth inequality has remained significantly higher than in France, UK, US, China, Russia and India. Now that the Covid-19 lockdown and relief measures are having severe impacts on public debt, while reducing expected tax revenues and increasing necessary expenditure, is it time for a wealth tax? Public debt is likely to spike to hazardous levels and even with the rescue financing, South Africa’s capacity to repay debts needs to be supported, researchers from the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) at Wits University, the Université.