Worldwide Wealth
I thought it would be interesting to pass along some high level information on world wealth. The numbers and charts are from the latest UBS Global Wealth Report, which looks at data as of the end of 2022. I found UBS’s highlights of where the wealth is, the number of millionaires, and the concentration of wealth eye-opening, and the inequality between the top and the bottom of the wealth pyramid eye-popping.
Where’s The Wealth
Chart 1 below shows 4 categories of average wealth per adult across world regions. It is probably no surprise to you that world wealth is concentrated in North America and Europe. According to the UBS report, these two regions account for 56% of total wealth but only 16% of the world adult population. Other wealthy regions are the richer parts of East Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. In the U.S., the average wealth per adult came in at USD $551K , while in Canada it was USD $137K.
Chart 1
Wealth Inequality
The pyramid in Chart 2 shows the number of adults in four different wealth ranges (<USD $10K; USD $10K to $100K; USD $100K to $1M; >USD $1M) versus how much of world wealth they hold. The most dramatic numbers are the bottom and top of the pyramid. At the bottom (<$USD 10K) there are 2.8B adults, representing 52.5% of the world adult population, but they only hold 1.2% of world wealth. Compare that to the 59.4M adults at the top (>USD $1M), representing only 1.1% of the adults in the world, who hold 45.8% of the wealth! This percentage is only slightly lower than it was 20 years ago.
Chart 2
Where Are The Millionaires
Chart 3 below shows the percentage of world millionaires in various countries. The U.S. has the dominant share at 38%, versus having 5% of the world’s adult population. Mainland China has 11% of world wealth and 21% of the world’s adult population. Canada and Australia each come in at 3% of world wealth and in combination only have about 1% of the world’s adult population.
Chart 3
Wealthy Wealthy
Chart 4 is a breakdown of wealth among millionaire categories. Unsurprisingly, it is a pyramid shape with most millionaires having USD $1M to $5M and a small number at the top with greater than USD $50M. The bottom range of millionaires is 87% of the world millionaire population, and the top is just 0.4%.
Chart 4
As shown in Chart 1, there were 59 million millionaires in the world at the end of 2022, which was up substantially from 15 million at the end of 2000. The driver behind this was the sizable increase in the value of financial assets in the last 20 years. The fastest growing millionaire population was in Mainland China, growing from 0.04M to 13M over 2000 to 2022, an annualized increase of 26% per year.
World Wealth Wrapup
We see that while the number of millionaires has grown over the last two decades, the percentage of wealth concentrated in the top 1% remains extremely high. The inequality gap has remained persistently large over the last 20 years, with the top 1.1% of the adult population holding 46% of world wealth and the bottom 53% holding only 1% of world wealth. Within the millionaire class, most have between USD $1M to $5M. Wealth remains concentrated in the developed countries, with the U.S. having the largest share despite having only a small percentage of the world’s population. And while China’s share of millionaires is much lower at 11%, the number of millionaires increased the fastest among all countries over the last 20 years. Overall, while the number of millionaires has grown worldwide, it is still an exceedingly small group at only 1% of the world’s adult population.
Invest Wisely,
Dave Schaffner, CFA
Principal, Wayfairer Capital Management Ltd.