The World Distribution of Household Wealth

By J. Davies, S. Sandström, Anthony Shorrocks, E. Wolff. 2007

349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There has been much recent research on the world distribution of income, but also growing recognition of the importance of other contributions to well-being, including those of household wealth. Wealth is important in providing security and opportunity, particularly in poorer countries that lack full social safety nets and adequate facilities for borrowing and lending. We find, however, that it is precisely in the latter countries where household wealth is the lowest, both in absolute and relative terms. Globally, wealth is more concentrated than income both on an individual and national basis. Roughly thirty percent of world wealth is found in each of North America, Europe, and the rich Asian-Pacific countries. These areas account for virtually all of the world’s top 1 per cent of wealth holders. On an official exchange rate basis India accounts for about a quarter of the adults in the bottom three global wealth deciles while China provides about a third of those in the fourth to eighth deciles. If current growth trends continue, …/

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31f5a358d7c2d50e2025b4e6cbda6d232800d61c

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Citations in the corpus

Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster (2008, background): “(2006) show that distribution of wealth is far more unequal than the distribution of income (Davies et al. 2006).”
Estimating the Level and Distribution of Global Household Wealth (2007, background): “They are also discussed in detail in Davies et al. (2007) which places more emphasis on the upper tail of the distribution.”
Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion – A Rapid Review of Income Distribution in 141 Countries (2011, neutral): “And according to UNU-WIDER, the top ten percent of adults own 85 percent of global household wealth; the average member of the top decile has nearly 3,000 times the mean wealth of the bottom decile (Davies et al. 2008:7).”
Depression as a disease of modernity: explanations for increasing prevalence (2012, methodology): “The Japanese also exhibit a relatively low degree of inequality for a highly modern, capitalistic society (Davies et al., 2008).”
Gender and Asset Ownership : A Guide to Collecting Individual-Level Data (2008, background): “Indeed, they have been used by researchers to estimate the distribution of wealth at the national level in many developing countries (Davies et al. 2006).”
Accounting for human rights: The challenge of globalization and foreign investment agreements (2011, background): “39 It may be argued that investment and trade per se are not necessarily the cause of human rights problems or violations, but rather the agreements have effects which encourage governments and corporations to ignore human rights obligations, or constrain governments from taking steps to improve…”
Key issues when using tax data for concentration analysis: an application to the Spanish wealth tax (2009, background): “See also Notes of Table 2.”
Declining inequality in Latin America: Some economics, some politics * (2011, neutral): “The distribution of wealth is everywhere more unequal than the distribution of income (Davies et al., 2006).”
Property rights and the gender distribution of wealth in Ecuador, Ghana and India (2013, background): “In most developed countries financial assets tend to represent at least one-quarter or more of total gross household wealth, thus we would expect this share to be lower in our three countries [8].”