Another prominent feature in this year’s wealth report is the rise of China to second place in terms of world wealth rankings. “The main outcome of the new wealth valuations is confirmation of what many observers already suspected – that China is now clearly established in second place in the world wealth hierarchy,” the report noted.
“The country overtook Japan with respect to the number of ultra-high net worth (UHNW) individuals in 2009, total wealth in 2011 and the number of millionaires in 2014. Nevertheless, the data shows that mean wealth per adult in China ($47,810 in mid-2018) remains far below the level in Japan ($227,240) and median wealth lags even further behind Japan ($16,330 versus $103,860).
One of the report’s authors told CNBC that the general trend is one of rising household wealth.
“We are seeing wealth increase, we are seeing that the distribution, regionally, is also moving along so it was made as a comment that China is now emerging as the second holder of total wealth,” Nannette Hechler Fayd’herbe, global head of Investment Strategy & Research at Credit Suisse, told CNBC Europe’s “Squawk Box” Thursday.
“Of course, if you break it down into mean wealth per person and median wealth per person there is still a catch up, but the general sense is that there has been progress in the formation of wealth.”
Wealth inequality is a key feature in the report, which noted “that the bottom half of adults collectively owns less than 1 percent of total wealth, the richest decile (top 10 percent of adults) owns 85 percent of global wealth, and the top percentile alone accounts for almost half of all household wealth (47 percent).”
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