Thursday 1 November 2007

Wealth Trivia - Where do You and We Stand?

Came across this interesting post titled Wealth of Nations on the Enough Wealth blog. Want to know where you personally stand on the wealth ladder, or Canada or the UK or the USA? Check out
the original paper "The World Distribution of Household Wealth" by J. Davies, S. Sandstrom, A. Shorrocks, and E. Wolff''. It has lots more fascinating trivia. The data is from the year 2000 in US$ so one would need to add for inflation (16-20%?) to bring absolute numbers up to date.

EnoughWealth does a little calculation to figure out that the USA isn't the richest country per head, it's Japan. Canada is 7th while the UK is 3rd.

Other goodies from the paper:
  • Canadians are much less adventurous than people in the USA when it comes to holding stocks and equities - 32% vs 51% of total financial assets (the other choice is liquid assets) are held in stocks and equities; the UK is even further behind at only 25% (cf Table 3) but the Italians are the champions at 55%
  • there are about 13,568,229 millionaires in the world, 451,809 people with ten million, 15,010 with a hundred million and only 499 with a billion - each higher step has only 3.3% of the number in the group below
  • Canada has its wealth spread more evenly than both the USA and the UK - the wealthiest 10% held only 53% of the total in Canada vs 70% and 56% respectively
  • the highest net worth per capita was in the USA at about $144,000 - where do you or your family stand? (I think the reason that Enough Wealth's table differs and puts Japan ahead of the USA is that he draws his data from a table in the original report which is per adult not per capita); Canada's net worth per capita was only $89,000 (or $72,000 according to another method the authors used to estimate the figure) and the UK was $129,000; interestingly, Greenland is at $138,000

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