Tag Archives: Wealth

Infographics, Wealth and Income Inequality

The World Wealth Report 2013

Leave a comment

 

The World Wealth Report reports on trends in the wealth of HNWIs – Or High Net Wealth Individuals. These are individuals with $1million or more in investable assets. You have to sign up to be able to download the report, but its free. (Thankyee for the crust kind sirs, doffs cap…) 

Between 2011-12, the richest 12 million people in the world gained an extra 4.2 trillion dollars of wealth between them – Their total wealth is now $46.2 billion, up from $42 billion in 2011. Thats a tidy $350 000 each extra on average, and according to the predictions below that trend is set to continue…

wealth1

Of course it gets bleaker… the averages above disguise the fact that the richest Ultra High Net Wealth Individuals increased their overal wealth more than the mere ‘millionnaires next door’… the proportional increases may well be the same, but of course a 10% gain on $50 million means you gain more than if you’d gained 10% on a mere $1 million.

wealth4

 

And bleaker… The richest 12 million may have got 10% richer on average, but this is on the back of a mere 2.2% GDP growth rate, so their wealth is growing nearly five times the rate of real global wealth (although somehow I’m sure that’s not a fair comparison?!)

wealth5

 

And even bleaker… according to the World Bank’s GNI data (not the same as wealth I know) –  GNI only increased from around 70 to 71.4 trillion dollars, which is less than 1%, so most of this wealth increse doesn’t seem to be rooted in the production of tangible goods and services.

No doubt there are different ways of interpreting what this data actually means, comments welcome!

 

In case you prefer a word-based summary – the 2013 report notes the following…

  • Between 2011 to 2012 The world’s HNWI population increased by 9.2% to reach 12.0 million, after remaining flat in 2011.
  • In the same period, The aggregate investable wealth increased 10.0% to US$46.2 trillion, after declining slightly in 2011.
  • ƒHNWI wealth in 2012 represented a new level of strength, going well past the historical high of US$42.7 trillion set in 2010.
  • Relatively stronger growth rates in higher wealth bands4 (US$5 million or more) led the growth of overall investable wealth globally.
  • All of this is despite a decline in the rate of world GDP growth to 2.2% last year.

 

 

Changing Britain, Wealth and Income Inequality

Inequality updates – UK Focus

Leave a comment

While the recent recession and ‘recovery’ have meant economic hardship and uncertainty for the majority, the VERY rich have got relatively richer.

Before looking at things sociologically (looking at the bigger picture) I’d just llike to say THANKS AGAIN TO THE BBC* for another excellent example of narrow-reporting which fosters false consciousness – This item reminds us that the levels of income inequality have fallen – if we compare the top fifth with the bottom fith of households over the last year.

HOWEVER…. If we look at how the incomes of the top one percent and top ten percent compare to other slices of the population further down the social-class spectrum, a picture of INCREASING INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE UK EMERGES

This article from The Guardian summarises the situation –

The super-rich – the top 1% of earners – now pocket 10p in every pound of income paid in Britain, while the poorest half of the population take home only 18p of every pound between them, according to a report published this week by the Resolution Foundation thinktank, which reveals the widening gap between those at the very top and the rest of society.

Inequality has grown sharply over the past 15 years, according to Resolution’s analysis: the top 1% of earners have seen their slice of the pie increase from 7% in the mid-1990s to 10% today, while the bottom half have seen their share drop from 19% to 18%.

This post from the Guerilla Policy Network offers a nice summary of the lates UN Human Development Report which highlights the following facts –

  • The UK’s poorest 40% share in just 14.6% of the national wealth – the only country performing worse was Russia (96)
  • The richest 20% have incomes more than ten times as high as the bottom 20%, this is the same as Nigeria, and worse than Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and twice as bad as Sri Lanka and Ethiopia (96)
  • As inequality in the UK has risen, intergenerational mobility (children ‘doing better’ than their parents) has also declined (2013 p36)
  • The majority of working people have had little or no wage increases in recent decades, while the top earners have seen substantial increases (2013 p22)

For those of you who prefer Infographics to illustrate inequality, here is one from the equality trust (love their work – ‘gis a job!)

income-inequality-uk-2

*(Seriously, thankyou, without you, BBC, teaching concepts such as ideological control, agenda setting, and false consciousness is just so easy.)

Wealth and Income Inequality

Whither my vain search for nice graphs on UK wealth statistics

2 Comments

… Hopefully in a response that’ll land me with a link to some nice.. err.. wealth distrbution graphs or pie charts…

I’ve spent the last 5 years or so looking for some nice up to date visual resources on wealth distribution in modern Britain, to update the pie chars I’ve gto from about 2006 – with really limited success – is it just me or is it just impossible to find easily accessible information on wealth stats in the UK… Or are pie charts on wealth distribution just not 2012? (or 2007-11 for that matter?)

You might think that searching around the government’s own Office for National Statistics, you’d get some info about wealth, but no, this gets  you nowhere – not if you want any data from the last few years at least.

Out of desperation you might try typing in any combination of ‘wealth distribution 2010 or 11 and UK or Britain’ to google but, with the exception of the excellent report mentioned below from 2010,  you simply get directed to old stats or stats on income distribution – so this is hopeless.  

So  unless I’m missing something – it’s actually very difficult to get reliable, up to date info on Wealth Stats – but here’s five, well four, sources of info.. no nice pie charts tho’!

Firstly there is this recent government report The most comprehensive recent source on wealth distribution seems to be this report from 2010 ‘An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK’ (summarised in this Guardian Article) which found that by retirement age the top 10%, led by higher professionals, had amassed wealth of £853 000,  while the bottom 10% of households, led by routine manual workers, had amassed less than £8,000. This means – and this is my headline figure – the richest 10% are 100 times richer than the bottom 10%

For an even starker comparison – the top 1% had, by the time they reached retirement age,  accrued an average wealth of £2.6 million, making them more than 300 times richer than the bottom 10%

The report measured wealth inequalities by looking at total assets accrued over the course of a lifetime – the findings were hardly surprising – the older you are the richer you are, the poorer your parents were, the less likely you were to accrue wealth and so on…. but it is informative to have such data to hand.

The body responsible for the above report is worth keeping an eye on – The Centre for Analaysis of Social Exclusion for updates on wealth issues.

Secondly, the most recent data from the Office for National Statistics (summarised in a blog which I’m not going to link to because it doesn’t link to anyone else) – reports that

The richest fifth have nearly two thirds of the wealth. More startling is that the poorer half of us speak for just 9p in every £1 of privately held wealth.
Private household net wealth in Great Britain totalled £9 trillion in 2006/08 and nearly 80% of this is accumulated in property and private pension entitlements. 

Median household net wealth was £204,500 in 2006/08. The least wealthy half of households accounted for only 9 per cent of wealth, while the wealthiest 20 per cent of households had 62 per cent of total wealth.

The least wealthy 10 per cent of households had negative total net wealth
Median net wealth – including pensions, houses and cars, but excluding mortgages and other debt – of a household in the South East is £287,900. In Scotland, it is £150,600.

Thirdly, you could use the recent Barclay’s wealth report I blogged about two blogs back

Fourthly, everyone of course knows about the rich list – I’m now reliant on other people’s summaries of this because of the Time’s paywall, and in any case, its international so the this list isn’t UK focussed and it doesn’t talk of ‘distribution’ focussing merely on the worst excesses.

Finally, For income inequalities – we can rely on the JRF’s yearly report on Poverty and Inequality – but this is based on income measurements rather than wealth.

You might like to think about why it’s so hard to find info on this stuff… Or if you know more about where to get this data from than I do, let me know!