Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.

Today's show is going to be talking about the Indian economy, now that the India is becoming

the largest country on earth, surpassing by population, surpassing China. The non-competition

clause in lots of job contracts that's being

fought out in this country at this time, and then the peculiar capitalist problems of our

insurance industry that affect us all in countless ways.

And then we'll have, in the second half, an interview with a remarkable professor of

public health, Dr. Steven Bezruchka.

So let's jump right in.

Oxfam over in the United Kingdom, one of the most widely studied and respected research

institutes when it comes to charting distributions of wealth and income around the world,

has just released a report on India. And there are things in there about India I want to talk to you about,

but not so much because of the significance, although it's enormous, for India, but the larger

lesson about the world that is buried in what I'm about to tell you. Okay, first, Oxfam shows that the richest 1% of people

in India, and remember it has 1.3, 1.4 billion people in that country, the richest 1% own

40.5% of the total wealth.

In 2020, India had 102 billionaires.

Today it has 166.

The pandemic may have killed huge numbers of Indians as well as people around the world,

but it made more billionaires in that country.

Forty percent of the wealth created in India between 2012 and 2021 went to the top 1%.

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