Where are the billionaires on the planet? The answer in five graphs

As the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have ushered the world into a new phase of globalization, it is worth looking in the rear view mirror. Over the past forty years, the world has become incredibly rich and inequalities between countries have been reduced. Problem, even within the major Western countries, income and especially wealth inequalities have widened significantly. With one major exception: France, where the redistributive system is quite effective.

In two decades, global wealth has quadrupled. If the United States and Europe concentrate the largest part of the cake, it is in China and India that the progression has been the strongest. In China, this enrichment has been very unequal: the 10% of the wealthiest households capture 42% of the income and have in their hands 62% of the heritage…

The United States remains the country where the number of “super-rich” is the most important. According to the latest Credit Suisse report, there are just over 141,000 people with wealth over $50 million, compared to just over 32,000 in China. There are more than 4600 in France… and almost twice as many across the Rhine.

When it comes to inequality, there is perception and statistical reality. This is particularly true for the French model. Even if it is more and more perforated, the tricolor net of social protection and redistribution works somehow.

In France, unlike most large countries, the share of income captured by the richest 1% of households has remained broadly stable over the past few decades. In 2021, they only received 9.8% of all income distributed against 12.8% across the Rhine, 16.6% in Israel or 18.8% in the United States.

Second observation: in terms of the distribution of heritage, photography has on the other hand become darker over the past thirty years. If we still look at the class of “the wealthiest 1%”, they now account for 27% of the heritage. This is almost 10 points more than the low point of the mid-1980s. only in 1970. The fact remains that we are very far from having regained the situation of the beginning of the 20th century when the wealthiest alone possessed half of the total wealth of the country. Above all, France is in the European average and, in this area, our German neighbor is doing rather less well.