World Distribution of Wealth, 2008

 

I was feeling frustrated with a book on socially conscious investing that I was reading, and so turned (of course) to wikipedia for more solid information. This took me (via reference links) to some UN publications, in one of which I found the above chart.

The chart shows the distribution of adults whose personal wealth is in the top 10% of world wealth. As can be seen, the US has 25% of the richest 10%. (As several publications pointed out, it's important to be mindful of the distinction between wealth from income.)

The paper (note: it's a discussion paper only) is from UNU_WIDER (United Nations University — World Institute for Development Economic Research):

Discussion Paper No. 2008/03
The World Distribution of Household Wealth
James B. Davies, Susanna Sandström,
Anthony Shorrocks, and Edward N. Wolff
February 2008
ISBN 978-92-9230-064-7 (printed publication)

I found the following paragraphs especially notable:

"Table 2 summarizes our results on the distribution of household wealth across the world population of 3.7 billion adults, based on official exchange rates and figures for the year 2000. According to our estimates, adults required just $2,138 in order to be among the wealthiest half of the world. But more than $61,000 was needed to belong to the top 10 per cent and more than $510,000 per adult was required for membership of the top 1 per cent. The entrance fee for the top 1 per cent seems surprisingly high, given than the group has 37 million adult members. Furthermore, the figure refers to the year 2000 and is now likely to be considerably higher, especially when measured in US dollars.

"The wealth share estimates reveal that the richest 2 per cent of adult individuals own more than half of all global wealth, with the richest 1 per cent alone accounting for 40 per cent of global assets. The corresponding figures for the top 5 per cent and the top 10 per cent are 71 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively. In contrast, the bottom half of wealth holders together hold barely 1 per cent of global wealth. Members of the top decile are almost 400 times richer, on average, than the bottom 50 per cent, and members of the top percentile are almost 2,000 times richer."

"... The final column of Table 3 records wealth Gini estimates ranging from 0.547 for Japan to 0.801 for the USA and 0.803 for Switzerland. The global wealth Gini is estimated to be even greater at 0.892. This is equivalent to the Gini value that would be registered for a 100-person population in which one person receives $900 and the remaining 99 people each receive $1."

Amazing. The world is a rough place.