Distribution: Progress is in the eye of the beholder

As a result of this high global wealth concentration, there is also a large gap between the global median and the global average of net financial assets. While the median of net financial assets in 2023 was 1,920 euros per capita, the average was almost 17 times higher (32,170 euros). Again, the comparison to the national figure (unweighted average of all countries) is revealing: the relation between average and median is at 3.1 much lower within countries.

At first glance, it seems encouraging that average net wealth per capita grew much faster in the lowest deciles than in the two richest deciles (Figure 31). However, given the huge absolute differences between the deciles, even with high growth differentials, a more equal distribution of wealth at the global level remains a distant dream. A word about the 1st decile with the lowest net financial assets. Its negative growth rate implies a decline in their "net financial assets" – because debt kept rising.

The pattern is repeated in the global high wealth class (Figure 33), at least with regard to China: many Chinese have managed to climb into this class, with 23.4% of its members now recruited from China (population share around 10%); 20 years ago, China played virtually no role in this wealth class. However, North America still accounts for the largest contingent, even if its share has fallen sharply to 30.8%. In absolute terms, however, the global high wealth class (like the middle class) has continued to grow in North America; its share of the population has hardly changed at 49%. This is where the North American trend differs from that in Western Europe: here, the number of members has fallen in absolute terms and their share of the population has fallen sharply from 38.0% (2003) to 29.6% (2023) (mainly in favor of the middle wealth class). So while North America has been able to maintain its international position, Western Europe has lost considerable ground – fewer Western Europeans can feel that they belong to the global high wealth class today than 20 years ago.

In the three emerging regions – Asia (ex Japan & China), Latin America and Eastern Europe – the number of members of the global high wealth class has risen sharply in each case. However, while the population share also increased in the latter two regions, it remained largely stable in Asia (only the wealth middle class increased proportionately here). However, Eastern Europe and Latin America did not develop in sync either. In Eastern Europe, both the high and middle wealth classes benefited, while in Latin America only the former – an indication of greater polarization in the distribution of wealth, with the middle class shrinking.

Finally, the low wealth class (Figure 34). At first glance, there appear to be few shifts in this class. China's share has fallen slightly, reflecting both the absolute (-14.5%) and relative (population share from around 90% to just under 70%) decline in this asset class in China. By contrast, the share of the rest of Asia (excluding Japan) increased slightly, as the number of members of the global low wealth class in the region also rose (+19.9%); however, this is solely due to the strong population growth, with the population share falling by 7 pp to 90%. Developments in the two other emerging regions of Latin America and Eastern Europe also differed. While the population share in Eastern Europe fell relatively sharply, by 7.4 pp to 81.5%, as an absolute decline was also recorded, this decline was only half as large in Latin America (-3.7 pp to just under 88%) – as the absolute figures continued to rise. The same also applies to the two advanced regions of North America and Western Europe – with one key difference, however: even though the absolute increase was almost identical in both regions at 18.8% and 19.0% respectively, this led to diverging results for the share of the global low wealth class due to the different general population growth: in Western Europe it climbed by as much as 3 pp (to just under 34%), while in North America it remained stable at 29%. This confirms the picture from the analysis of the global high wealth class: the Old Continent has become “poorer” on a global scale.

The distribution situation is somewhat “friendlier” if the middle or the numerical size of the three large asset classes low, middle and high is taken into consideration. The respective national average of net financial assets is the benchmark for the classification.

Table 2 provides an overview of how the middle class has changed in terms of the number of its members in the individual countries. What is immediately apparent is that the middle class has remained stable in this regard in the vast majority of countries. This group includes most European countries (both East and West). The rich are getting richer, but this is not accompanied by a crumbling of the middle; there is no evidence of a social decline of broad sections of the population in the wealth data of recent years. On the contrary, there are even a few countries – again mainly in Europe – where the number of members of the middle class has risen in the last 20 years. Norway is the only country where this growth has come from the high wealth class. In all other countries, on the other hand, the growth is attributable to the rise of members from the low wealth class.

The interesting group, however, is the third, in which the middle class has shrunk in terms of numbers. This is particularly the case in some Asian countries, where the decline has been very sharp in some cases. The reason for this is the rapid growth in wealth over the last two decades. Twenty years ago, there was hardly any private wealth in countries such as Cambodia, Indonesia or Vietnam; this also applies to India and China, at least with regard to the vast majority of the population: everyone was “middle class”, but the middle was poor. It was only with the accumulation of wealth that greater differences in wealth ownership emerged. The rapid growth in wealth went hand in hand with the first differentiation of the population into different wealth classes. Of course, this does not apply to the UK and the USA, where the middle class has also shrunk (albeit not as much), an indication of the still unresolved distribution problem in these countries, although at least the last ten years have been characterized by a certain stability.

The finding of the relative stability of wealth distribution across the board is also supported by the ratio of the mean to the median – a common measure of distribution. This value has hardly changed over the last two decades; it has even fallen minimally from 3.2 (2003) to 3.1 (2023) (unweighted average of the countries under review in each case), i.e. the gap between the mean and median has become slightly smaller in relative terms. But of course this does not apply to all countries (Figure 36). In fact, there are only very few countries in which this ratio has changed significantly (by more than 0.5 pp). On the one side (deterioration) are India, Switzerland, China and Brazil, countries in which wealth concentration has risen rather sharply; on the other side (improvement) are Türkiye and Colombia, among others. For the majority of countries, however, this value is relatively stable, which indicates that the median and mean have grown more or less synchronously. This underlines once again that the increased concentration of wealth observed in many countries is not due to the middle falling behind, but rather to an extraordinary increase in the wealth of a few at the top of the distribution pyramid.