despite the near full evacuation of the city, the battle for bakhmut rages on. all 70,000 residents have left but it remains a key target for russia as the military intensifies its assault on the city. ukrainian authorities say there is little hope of finding anyone else alive in the rubble. at least 40 people were killed in the attack on a saturday, dozens more are missing. >> one girl is in great condition.

she is 19 and now in the emergency ward. there are three people in the war including the girl. that you have relatively severe conditions including head trauma. >> belarus and russia have began to weeks of joint military exercises. this time the defense ministry says the exercises are defensive. germany's defense minister has resigned as the country faces pressure. the media's focus on her was getting in the way about the country's preparedness. a visual has been held for the victims of a plane crash on a sunday that left 72 people dead. about 100 people gathered outside the international airport in the capital. they observed a day of national mourning on monday and set up a panel to investigate the

countries deadliest crash in 30 years. italy's most wanted mafia boss has been arrested after 30 years on the run. police detained him in the sicilian city. he had been convicted for being behind killings and bomb attacks and was given a life sentence. he is considered the last remaining godfather of the mafia. somalia says its military has recaptured a town. the coastal area had been under control of the armed group for the past 15 years. they launched an offensive in august. there have been violent confrontations between protesters and the police and sri lanka's capital. under those students were calling for the release of a prominent activist who was arrested five month ago. those are the headlines. the news continues here after inside story. thank you for watching. ♪

>> is globalization coming to an end? world leaders at this year's gathering in davos are debating ways to revive the global economic order after covid-19 and the war in ukraine ongoing, how realistic is that? and can the geopolitical challenges be overcome? this is inside story. ♪ >> hello there, and welcome to the program.

i am laura kyle. the richest and most influential leaders on the planet have kick started their annual world's economic forum in the swiss alpine resort town of davos. they began gathering this week and so did protesters. >> [chanting] >> they include a group of millionaires who want the world's elite to get serious about global wealth disparities. other activists are demanding stronger action to tackle the climate crisis including curbing the oil and gas industries. >> i am here with patriotic millionaires from the u.k. and i've come out to join the protest here because we are in favor of wealth taxes. we really want to reduce this level of wealth inequality in the world that is so corrosive to society. you give your governments permission to tax you and to reduce your wealth, the government's could do much more useful things with your money than you can. >> we see that the wef is inviting a lot of companies that are doing harm that are not

accepting human rights that are violating the climate in different ways. >> countries like sri lanka and zambia who are struggling a major debt crisis, they cannot afford to come out of this crisis because blackrock refuses to renegotiate and cancel the debt that is urgently needed so we can take time and action and take care of our people in of the global south. >> inside and sticking to tradition, the wef founder and executive chairman klaus schwab gave the opening speech saying -- >> here we are at the beginning of the new year looking ahead to our future characterized by unprecedented multiple crises. even worse, so is economic, environmental, social and geopolitical crisis are converging and conflicting creating an extremely versatile and uncertain future. it is no supply that generally

-- it is nosa prize -- no surprise that generally we are all stuck in a crisis mindset. and that leads to short-term decision-making and may have long-term unintended damaging consequences. davos should help to shift that mindset. >> oxfam has released a report to coincide with the opening of davos. it says extreme poverty and extreme wealth have increased simultaneously for the first time since the beginning of the century. it shows the world's richest 1% got a lot richer the last two years. they amassed more than $40 trillion worth of new wealth. higher costs of living and inflation making the disparity worse. food prices are unaffordable for many. roughly 800 million people are going hungry. oxfam is calling for the world's wealthiest to pay higher taxes. it says a 5% tax on millionaires

and billionaires would raise around $1.7 trillion a year and that could lift 2 billion people out of poverty. let's bring in our guests now and in london we have max lawson head of inequality policy and advocacy at oxfam international. in davos is shirley yu, senior practitioner fellow at harvard kennedy school and member of the davos expert network. and also in london inderjeet parmar, professor of international politics at city university of london and author of the foundations of the american century. a very warm welcome to all of you, especially you, shirley, na -- in a very chilly davos there. what is the mood like? it is not a particularly uplifting opening speech that we heard given saying the world is changing and not for the better? >> we certainly live in an increasingly fractured world. thank you for having me.

tomorrow is a matter of fact, the very first session at the world economic forum will be a debate on deglobalization versus reglobalization. china is actually under represented at this year's davos. china is one of the major economic elephants that seems to be missing in the room. we are starting to see a lot of emerging economies coming in a big-time on the promenade. we see malaysia, the indonesian house, all of them are packed with people. we are living in an interesting world at the moment. >> explain to us the difference between de globalization and re globalization. what do these terms mean? >> i think we have to re-envision mobilization. -- globalization. what we have seen in the past four years or so is this comprehensive decoupling between the worlds two largest economies, the united states and china, from trade to investment

flow to technology and essentially two roles and norms and values and that is not going to improve anytime soon. we are seeing both china and the united states are trying to remove each other from the core supply chains. the u.s. talks about decentralizing china from the essential technological supply chain, and china is talking about economic self-reliance which is essentially the americanizing its supply chain. but at the same time we are seeing the world's two largest economies are recalibrating their global supply chains very much in the developing world and overlapping. in the future we are going to see a different form of globalization with the u.s. and china at the center and we are likely to see two parallel systems of local supply chains -- global supply chains and all the other multilateral architecture. >> max, what is your view on this? reordering of the global system is something that oxfam international has long called for. i imagine it is not quite in line with the way davos sees the

future but what does oxfam look for? >> i think we are looking for a more equal future. a future where there is a lot less wealth and power in the hands of a tiny group of people and yes, we are seeing some recalibration between the great power blocks but nothing has stopped the enormous accumulation of wealth whether those are chinese billionaires or american billionaires. we would like to see a fair version of globalization which sees more of the value that is created in the world kept by those at the bottom and not captured by those at the top. there does not seem to be much evidence of that yet. >> do you think globalization in itself is a good system? >> we would certainly be in favor of a fairer globalization. we don't think that all countries can or should cut themselves off in any economic sense but we do think globalization we have had over the last 30 years as manifestly

failed apart from those at the very top. and we are seeing tremendous hardship at the bottom. it is hard to exaggerate. at oxfam we work with some of the poorest people in the world in africa and asia but also here in the u.k. we have millions of people going to bed hungry. that is not a system that is working for anybody. the anger at the failure of that system is what's driving the polarization of politics and populism. globalization has clearly failed and if we are going to have a new globalization, it has to be very different indeed. >> inderjeet, what does a fairer globalization look like and can it be achieved? >> great questions. fairer globalization is along the lines of what max said that you have to go to the root of the problem. the root of the problem is hyper globalization has seen the rise of the transnational corporation to the center of world economic

distributions and world economic power. that power has been used in order to concentrate great levels of wealth and income and also political power and agenda setting power in the hands of relatively few people. those masters of the universe are assembling in davos now. i don't believe that they actually have any kind of realistic solutions to the problem and a large number of them probably don't even see it as a fundamental problem. i think their interests are very much short-term, profit lead, a few look further ahead and look at instabilities. the instabilities of domestic political systems, the military tensions between various strategic rivals, the militarization of governments and so on, increased arms spending. but i think most of them seem to be thinking that they are doing very well.

they have large amounts of wealth and power and i do not think they are going to be fundamentally tackling any of those core problems despite all the domestic and global crises which are overlapping in what people used to call 100 years ago, an organic crisis. it's a crisis at the very heart of that system. >> shirley, is that a fair criticism of davos or reflection of davos at the global elites, the masters of the universe, are they examining or aware of or discussing the problems of the bottom 99% of the world? >> there is certainly increasing disconnect here between the worlds of billionaires and economic realities of the wider developing world. however, talking about issues including climate change, poverty, and a lot of development issues, particularly

surrounding africa, are very much on the agenda at this year's forum. i wanted to say though, talking about poverty which is so much in the protest, over the past four decades or so we are seeing china think the biggest variable -- being the biggest variable in lifting the largest 800 million class onto the global horizon. fundamentally, in order to address the poverty issue, developments is really the ultimate solution. if we were to look at india, a billion population, africa, over a billion population, we're looking at the emerging economies in asia, another billion population. if we were just able to develop these economies and the conversion into the global north, then we are talking about lifting billions of people in the coming decades. i think that is the fundamental solution to global poverty. >> max, it is a fair point, isn't it? the current system has indeed

lifted many millions if not billions of people out of poverty. is it not just needing to be a continuation or reimagining of that current system, rather than stripping it away and starting again? >> i think if you look at the distribution of wealth and income over the last 40 years, remember we only have finite planetary boundaries. there are limits to how much we can grow and keep our planet safe. when you see 26%, 27%, -- $.26 in every new dollar going to the top 1%, and crumbs going to the bottom, yes it is true. over a long period you lift people above the extreme poverty line. they are living on five or six dollars a day instead of two dollars a day. that is an achievement, but we could have done so much better if we had a fairer distribution of wealth over the last 40 years. it is so inefficient to give

almost all of the wealth, two thirds of all the new wealth in the world has gone to the richest 1%. the people who do not need it. that is incredibly any fission. -- inefficient. yes, it drags up the poorest above the extreme poverty line but enormous cost and enormous inefficiency. so i don't think more of the same is the solution and i do not think as we always say with davos asking the arsonists how to put out the fire is a big mistake. these guys are the main beneficiaries of the last 40 years. looking to them for solutions is a fool's errand. >> but it is an opportunity. i will direct this question back to shirley. it is an opportunity for oxfam to present a report such as it has done and present a solution as it has done which is to tax the richest people in the world around 5% to create a huge fund that could lift billions of people out of poverty. davos presents an opportunity to

present this solution to them. but crucially, are people in davos going to be giving it any credence? are they going to discuss it? >> i think poverty elimination and addressing the global inequality compounded with it currently, with the u.s. raising the interest rates. i was talking with scholars from the emerging world and they are saying we are facing a double edged sword. if americans are feeling the pains, or the west is feeding the pains of inflation, just think about the people in africa. they are feeling the pain not only from inflationary pressure, that essentially spills over from the developed world, but they are actually being -- they are facing a depreciating local currency as well. it is a double-edged sword. they feel so much more pain and -- in the developing world than

the developed world. the voices here that are coming from the developing world are making it very clear to the global north that a lot of these fundamental issues need to be resolved. >> will these global elites take seriously this issue of being taxed 5%? >> for that particular question, we have to wait for the coming davos week in the coming days to see if there is any serious discussions about it. >> what is your feeling on that? do you think this is a solution that anyone at davos will be taking seriously? should they be taking it seriously? >> of course they must -- they have to take it seriously. they should be taking it seriously but the problem is they are structurally embedded in a whole system of profit-making which is very short-term and related to their own particular institutions, corporations and so on. there is very few laws that you could pass at the global level

where this would be -- they would be forced to. so what davos does is creates a forum but it is weighted towards people who can pay a membership fee of several hundred thousand dollars a year who have to then pay $29,000 to attend this particular meeting. a quarter of them are big corporations and their representatives. and you are asking them to tax themselves for the benefit of mankind. when you look at the entire development agenda, over the last 50 or 70 years, heaven -- they have been talking about alleviating poverty and alleviating hunger. greater inequality in the world and so on and so forth. but they have not really achieved it in any kind of great way. they have been failing at it all the time and the structural inequalities have continued to increase. and globalization is at the heart of that so the current arm -- form of globalization has had some benefits but for most people in the world it has made

their lives far worse. looking to davos and the billionaires who gather their and their corporations, i think you may discuss some problems, i think that market lead and corporate led solutions are very unlikely to lead to any kind of solution for ordinary people struggling in the world today. >> max, the u.n. secretary general he is at davos. he is going to be calling, or he has in the past week, called for a reform of what he calls the morally corrupt global financial system. this needs to take into account countries vulnerability and it certainly in terms of natural disasters that are coming fast and frequent with climate change, not only taking into account countries gdp. this sounds like a great idea but is it realistic? >> i think it is really important to grasp the

seriousness of the moment and that it is not just ordinary people all over the world facing a cost-of-living crisis. it is entire nations facing a cost-of-living crisis off the back of things they did not create. they did not create covid-19 which hit economies incredibly hard. they did not ask for the spinoff impacts of the war in ukraine and the spiraling interest rates in the u.s. developing countries are already very angry after the insane vaccine inequality, which seems like a long time ago now in the memories of policymakers, they saw the rich world basically look after its own citizens and ignore everyone else. now they can seek food prices spiraling up and as your other panelists said, interest rates rising in the u.s. has a huge knock on impact on the cost of debt repayments for countries worldwide. i think developing countries are very angry. i think they want to see significant changes to the way the global financial

architecture is organized and to see a situation where we have for the first time again in 10 or 20 years, the world bank has said that global inequality, the gap between the rich world and the poor world is growing at the fastest rate we have seen since world war ii. that is why you are seeing this anger from developing countries but let's not forget that it's also within countries also. here in the u.k. huge divide between rich and poor. it can be a bit simplistic. we see the rich world as the bad guy and the poor world as the good guy. we are seeing elites all over the world, many of whom are at davos, making a lot of money at today's economy. it is about inequality within countries, and between them. >> interestingly, we have noticed that a lot of the political elites, the prime minister of the u.k., joe biden, the president of the u.s., even

emmanuel macron of france are not appearing at davos because to stand there in the face of people struggling in their home countries with a rising cost of living does not look great. does this concern davos as a forum and its future? >> davos itself certainly has a lot of issues to consider in order to have this longevity and relating to the most pertinent global issues but let me explain. this is the first time post-covid that world leaders in the policy thinkers are appearing in davos. so there is a certain amount of nostalgia but there is a lot of changes as i personally observed in this year's davos from four years ago. this morning i attended a couple events related to block chain and the financial technology. very enthusiastic crowd and they

were asking questions about how decentralized the financial technologies are going to help address the fundamental financial issues that developing worlds are facing. we are seeing a lot of developing world presents and a lot of the block chain technologies, metaverse and a lot of technologies this year. so i think there are many aspirational agendas that are beyond the political strife that we as a world face today and we are seeing a lot of technologies that davos is garnering this year. and these technologies are really sharing ideas that can best not only disrupt the west, but also integrating the developing world with it. when it comes to political issues, a very big agenda is this fundamental debate about democracy and autocracy. we are seeing a large delegation

from ukraine that are essentially participating at every level of davos discussions this year. i think the west is probably going to show a further sign of solidarity facing our world today. >> on that note of innovation, davos having a great spirit of technological innovation, how key is that going to be in finding global solutions to global challenges in this world that is becoming increasingly fragmented? >> absolutely. technological solutions to major problems like climate change and so on are fundamental. they are really important but the key thing about technology, it is not a neutral force. technology is in the hands of some people who own or control it and then they deploy it in order to make very large amounts of money for themselves. governments that use that and incentivize their companies to do those things. the key issue then remains that

although few can have new -- you can have new technology just like you have new vaccines during the covid-19 pandemic which is ongoing, the key question at the core of everything we discussed today really is who holds power? who benefits from the structures of power at the world level to -- today? what we see is it is in the hands of very few people but we also see the other side of it, which is right across the world, we see people going on strike, people marching against climate change and the claimant -- claimant -- climate emergency and so on. people fighting for their and economic rights etc.. we see large numbers of ordinary people in various ways resisting this and demanding alternatives. but we see governments all over

the world's really not listening very much and i think they need to see that their own long-term interests are deeply destabilized by political forces which cannot live in the old way and if the government cannot produce and to the big corporations cannot produce, then there is going to be even more political instability which may force other forms of reform and change as well which may be very difficult to contain. >> we must leave our discussion for today. thank you very much to all our guests. and thank you for watching. you can see the program again anytime by visiting our website aljazeera.com and for further discussion do go to our facebook page. that's facebook.com/ajinsidestory. you can also join the conversation on twitter. our handle is @ajinsidestory. from me and the whole team here in doha, it is bye for now. ♪

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