Who has the Wealth

The top 1% of households globally own 43% of all personal wealth.

The bottom 50% have only 1%.  

The 1% are all millionaires in net wealth (after debt) and there are 52m of them.  Within this 1%, there are 175,000 ultra-wealthy people with over $50m in net wealth – that’s a minuscule number of people (less than 0.1%) owning 25% of the world’s wealth.

At the end of 2019, North America and Europe accounted for 55% of total global wealth, with only 17% of the world adult population. In contrast, the population share was three times larger than the wealth share in Latin America, four times the wealth share in India, and nearly ten times the wealth share in Africa.

Wealth differences within countries are even more pronounced. 

The top 1% of wealth holders in a country typically own 25%–40% of all wealth, and the top 10% usually account for 55%–75%. At the end of 2019, millionaires around the world – which number exactly 1% of the adult population – accounted for 43.4% of global net worth. In contrast, 54% of adults with wealth below US$10,000 (i.e. pretty much nothing)  together mustered less than 2% of global wealth.

 In 2019, the number of millionaires worldwide soared to 51.9 million, but has changed very little overall during the first half of 2020.

At the start of this year there were 175,690 ultra-high net worth (UHNW) adults in the world with net worth exceeding US$50 million. The total number of UHNW adults rose by 16,760 (11%) in 2019, but 120 members were lost during the first half of 2020, leaving a net gain of 16,640 in UHNW membership since the start of 2019.

During the first half of 2020, the number of millionaires shrank by 56,000 overall, just 1% of the 5.7 million added in 2019. Membership has expanded in some countries and some have lost significant numbers. The United Kingdom (down 241,000), Brazil (down 116,000), Australia (down 83,000) and Canada (down 72,000) all shed more millionaires than the world as a whole.

Today, the bottom 90% accounts for 19% of global wealth, compared to 11% in the year 2000.  In other words, there was a concentration of wealth towards the top 1% (and even more to 0.1%), but with some dispersion among the remaining 99%.

In short, what the report shows is billions of people have no wealth at all after debts and that the distribution of global personal wealth.

Richest 1% own 43% of global wealth, while billions have no wealth at all | Climate & Capitalism (climateandcapitalism.com)