The global wealth is estimated to be close to $450 trillion. Almost half of this wealth is wealth (about 47.5%; or $213 trillion) is controlled by just 1.5% of the world’s adult population. The data were released in the 2024 UBS Global Wealth Report (PDF), which sampled 56 markets that account for 92 percent of global wealth.
Excluding China, the majority of this wealth is in the hands of countries belonging to the Western Nation block, with the United States being home to the highest number of millionaires (individuals possessing wealth that $1 million or more) 21.95 million persons, 3.06 million millionaires living in the United Kingdom, 2.87 million millionaires living in France, and 2.83 million millionaires living in Japan. China, a non-Western nation-state, is home to about 6.01 million millionaires.
UBS defines wealth as the value of financial assets and real assets minus debts held by a household.
In contrast to the 1.5% of the wealthiest persons in the world, about 40% percent of the world’s adults have an average personal wealth of less than $10,000 ($2.4 trillion of the $450 trillion global wealth.
In terms of recent trends, since 2000, Qatar saw the greatest increase in the number of millionaires, which rose from 46 to 26,163. China saw the second largest increase, from 39,000 to 6,013,282 millionaires, followed by Kazakhstan (918 to 44,307).
Both the disparity and the speed with which new millionaires are created point the need to study and understand the systems that create such wealth and weather such wealth can eventually be used to address the disproportional burden of confronting the problems created by overproduction including extreme poverty and climate change. The data also reveal that the theory of trickle down benefits of accumulated wealth did not materialize. In fact, the data show that the greater the wealth in the hands of the very few the greater is the level of poverty and need and the more widespread it has become.
Of note, while increased wealth and number of millionaires in Muslim-majority countries is clearly connected to extraction and exploitation of natural resources, increased wealth and number of millionaires in Western countries (and countries that adopted Western systems like China) is clearly connected to a plurality of systems that give advantage to nation-states with power. Equally important is that most of this wealth is disconnected from the historical sources of wealth: natural resources and work. The richest persons who increased their wealth fastest did so thanks to access to capital through the stock market structures, not through the actual production of goods and services.