A/72/139 areas. 15 The Special Rapporteur has also found during a number of her country visits, including to El Salvador, Ghana and the Niger, that poverty is a root cause of the worst forms of child labour. 16 Increasing global inequality 29. Global inequality has reached staggering levels. It was estimated that, in 2015, the richest 1 per cent of the world’s population owned 50 per cent of global wealth. 17 A report by Oxfam International further exemplified the severity of global inequality by indicating that a senior corporate executive at a company traded on the London Stock Exchange earns the equivalent to the annual wages of 10,000 people working in garment factories in Bangladesh. 18 30. Such profound and systemic inequality shows that the systemic design of our economies, as shaped by neo-liberal globalization, is not allowing the benefits of economic growth to be shared between people within societies. Inequality also has an impact on the way that actors within the value and supply chains of products and services benefit, with those at the top increasingly taking a larger share of the profits. The research by Oxfam International referenced above showed how, in the 1980s, cocoa farmers received 18 per cent of the value of a chocolate bar, whereas today they receive just 6 per cent. 19 While inequality is everywhere, trends suggest that inequality in lower-income and middle-income countries can be more extreme than in high-income countries. 20 31. This type of unfettered inequality is self-perpetuating, as the wealthy are far better able than other members of society to gain access to opportunities for investment and further wealth creation. Such elites are also in a position to capture public legislative and policy development processes to serve their own interests, which further entrenches their advantage in economic and social systems and simultaneously creates structures that limit upward social mobility for people in the lower classes. This process of co-opting State mechanisms by elites to serve their own interests can be particularly pronounced in countries that have high levels of corruption. 32. Inequality contributes specifically to the continued widespread existence of contemporary forms of slavery. Inequality creates significant barriers to the most vulnerable within society preventing them from finding ways out of deeply exploitative situations where they have no protection. Such structures also undermine the equity of development outcomes, which in turn significantly undermines efforts to prevent contemporary forms of slavery by addressing their root causes, such as poverty, lack of education, illiteracy and lack of access to decent work opportunities. For example, the World Bank estimates that the poorest children in developing countries are four times less likely than the richest children to be enrolled in primary education. 21 This polarization of outcomes means that the most poor and vulnerable will find it difficult to gain access to the services and support that can help them to avoid or escape situations of slavery. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation between countries that have high levels of corruption and those that have the highest prevalence of slavery. 22 Such corruption allows __________________ 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 10/21 See A/HRC/30/35/Add.1. Ibid.; see also A/HRC/33/46/Add.1. Markus Stierli and others, “Global wealth report 2015” (Zurich, Credit Suisse, 2015). Oxfam International, “An economy for the 99%”. Ibid. World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016: Taking on Inequality (Washington, D.C., 2016). Ibid. Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves. 17-11988