Year End Report On Global Inequality

[Jcrowley]

Deeply Unequal World

Sam Pizzigati | December 20, 2006

Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco, IPS

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

Some people, at year's end, like to spread holiday cheer. The world might do better, suggests a landmark new report  from the United Nations University in Helsinki, to start spreading wealth. The new study--the first ever to tally, for the entire world, all the major elements of household wealth, everything from financial assets and debts to land, homes, and other tangible property--finds some $125.3 trillion worth of wealth about in the world, as of the year 2000.

If that wealth were divided in perfectly equal shares among all the world’s 3.7 billion adults, every adult on Earth would hold a net worth of just under $34,000 in U.S. dollars, according to The World Distribution of Household Wealth report.

Most Wealth in Few Pockets

In real life, says this new report, released by the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, half the world’s adults hold under one-tenth that modest sum, less than $2,161. The vast bulk of the world’s wealth, the study observes, sits “highly concentrated” in the pockets of a relative few. How concentrated? The richest 5 percent of the world’s adults--minimum net worth, $150,145--hold 70.6 percent of the world’s wealth. The richest 1 percent--minimum wealth, $514,512--hold 39.9 percent of the world's wealth all by themselves, 13,000 times more than the entire bottom 10 percent.

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Super-Rich Not Counted

How accurately do all these global numbers reflect the actual distribution of the world’s household wealth? If anything, notes the UN University study authors, their report understates just how unequal the world’s wealth distribution has become. Their base survey data, they explain, “do not reflect the holdings of the super-rich.”

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Governing for the Elite

Governments that reflect these extreme inequalities in power, the World Bank economist added, tend to govern not in the public interest, but in the interest of wealthy elites.

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http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3819