Who Owns the World?

by Barry Weisleder / December 2006

The rich, right? The extent to which that is true is now more painfully apparent.

In a first-ever exhaustive study of global wealth, it's clear just how inequitably the wealth of the world is distributed.

The richest 2 per cent of adults own more than half of global household wealth, and almost all of the affluent live in North America, Europe and the richest Asia-Pacific countries.

While previous global surveys studied income, this is the first wide-ranging analysis of the international distribution of wealth, defined as the value of physical and financial assets minus liabilities.

"We find there's a lot of inequality, which is what we expected and is not that surprising," said University of Western Ontario economist James Davies, who was a co-author of the study, conducted by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations. "But it turns out, the world distribution of wealth [assets minus debts] is more unequal than the world distribution of income."

The United States is the richest country, with a mean wealth in the year 2000 of $144,000 (U.S.) per person. Canada has a mean wealth of $89,000 per person. Needless to say, mean averages tend to conceal the concentration of ownership in the class of business owners.

"Wealth in this sense represents the ownership of capital," the study says. "While only one part of personal resources, capital is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more broadly on economic development and growth."

The study estimates that the richest 1 per cent of adults alone owned 40 per cent of global assets in 2000, and that the richest 10 per cent of adults accounted for 85 per cent of the world total. By contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1 per cent of global wealth.