CHINESE TO SOAR UP THE SUPER-RICH RANKS
By Chris Giles in London
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
China's population is so large and its economy growing so quickly that it is set to displace Japan as the country with the world's second largest number of rich people after the US.
Research published this week showed that the Chinese, one fifth of the world's population, accounted for less than one-in-100 of the world's richest 10 per cent of adults.
But such is the pace of Chinese development, argues Professor Anthony Shorrocks of the United Nations University (UNU), the country will soon have more people in this group than Japan. The Japanese currently account for a fifth of the world's richest 10 per cent. In 2000, an adult needed to own $61,000 (�6,000, £31,000) of net assets to be in this group.
"It won't take very much for China to displace Japan as the second placed country," said Mr Shorrocks.
He argued that because millions of Chinese already had middle-ranking wealth and the value of their assets was rising quickly through high savings and fast economic growth, many more would soon join the world's richest.
In addition, although communist China's wealth is quite evenly spread, it is unlikely to remain so. By dint of their country's size, the Chinese elite will find itself occupying a leading position in the global wealth league.
China's probable advance contrasts with India, according to Mr Shorrocks, because India's wealth is already unequally distributed so there is not much scope for the development of a new large class of super-rich in the sub-continent.
The study by the UNU's World Institute for Development Economics Research (Wider) showed that global wealth is extremely unequally distributed. Half of the world's wealth - as measured by land, property and financial assets less debt - is held by the richest 2 per cent of the world's adults. Almost 90 per cent of the world's wealth is held in North America, Europe and rich Asian and Pacific countries, such as Japan and Australia.
Among the richest 1 per cent, 85 per cent live in the Group of Seven countries - the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada. Individuals needed $500,000 in 2000 to secure a place in this group, although as 37m people owned this amount, Mr Shorrocks said it could not be seen as an "exclusive club".
Wealth is so difficult to measure that the authors have spent the past six years attempting to make different national sources of data provide a consistent picture.
Other publications have focused on the world's very wealthiest, often without such detailed statistical foundations. This week Barclays Wealth together with the Economist Intelligence Unit, for example, estimated the number of super-rich individuals with more than $1m in financial assets alone would rise from 6m in 2006 to 16m in 2016.
Even with the rapid growth rates projected for China, the population is unlikely to accumulate such wealth quickly, so the Barclays study estimated that the world's most wealthy individuals would remain almost exclusively in the G7 countries.
