Funferal

Richest two percent own half of world’s wealth

The World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University has a new report on wealth distribution around the world. An interesting undertaking, and some interesting conclusions for those, like me, who like to track such things:

In this paper we show, first, that there are very large intra-country differences in the level of household wealth. The US is the richest country, with mean wealth estimated at $144,000 per person in the year 2000. At the opposite extreme among countries with wealth data, we have India with per capita wealth of about $6,500 in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. Other countries show a wide range of values. Even among high income OECD countries there is a range from figures of $56,000 for New Zealand and $66,000 for Denmark to $129,000 for the UK (again in PPP terms).

Of course, there’s also some useful data on wealth distributions within countries, and crunching of the data to figure out, as in the headline, the share of wealth held by different segments of the world population.