Do 85 rich people have same wealth as half the world?

More or Less, the BBC team that investigates numbers and statistics, is often asked to check out claims that readers or listeners to the radio programme find hard to believe.

Here are four often-quoted facts that the team has looked into.

Are the 85 richest people in the world as wealthy as the world’s poorest half?

A number of listeners got in touch to ask about this fact, widely reported around the world, from the Washington Post to CNN.

The figure comes from a report by British aid charity Oxfam. It got lots of attention, so the charity produced another figure for the UK, stating that the five richest families had more wealth than the poorest 20%. But how were these figures calculated?

Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, head of research at Oxfam GB, looked at data from the Global Wealth Report 2013 produced by bank Credit Suisse.

An elderly woman lies on the ground begging for alms in main street on the northern Greek port city of Thessaloniki in 2013
He totted up the total wealth that was attributed to the poorer half of the world’s population – less than 1% of the world’s wealth, about $1.7tn (£1tn).

He then went to the Forbes rich list and tallied up all the wealth of the top billionaires until he reached 1.7 trillion US dollars, reaching the 85th richest person in the world. The UK figure was calculated in a similar manner – using the Credit Suisse data and the Forbes list.

“We acknowledge, everyone acknowledges, that it has shortcomings but it is as good as it gets,” says Fuentes-Nieva.

The comparison has certainly generated headlines but is it reasonable?

There is a problem with Oxfam’s comparison because counter-intuitively, low wealth does not mean you are poor, says Dr Anthony Shorrocks, former director of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, and one of a number of respected economists behind the Credit Suisse report.

Some people in Western countries who fall into the bottom 50% for wealth may not be poor in the true sense. They might be a graduate in the UK laden with debt and no assets, or a young professional who spends all their income.

The other misconception, according to Deirdre McCloskey, professor of economic history at Gothenburg University in Sweden, is that these super-rich individuals have so much wealth that it’s making half the world poor.

But if you took all the money of the 85 richest people and gave it to the poor in a one-off payment, she says, it would only increase each person’s wealth by about $500 (£300). –BBC