The World's Billionaires
| Published date | 01 April 2013 |
| Date | 01 April 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1111/2041-9066.12012 |
| Subject Matter | In Focus |
The World’s Billionaires
In Focus
In spring 2012, Forbes Magazine reported
that there were 1153 billionaires across the
globe (this figure includes families, but ex-
cludes fortunes dispersed across large fami-
lies where the average wealth per person
is below a billion). The total wealth of the
billionaires was US$3.7 trillion – as great as
the annual gross domestic product of Ger-
many. Top of this league table is the US*
with 424 billionaires (or billionaire fami-
lies), followed by Russia (96) and China
(95).
Looking at data collected by WealthInsight
– which published more detailed statistics
on the geographic distribution of 521 of the
wealthiest billionaires – we can see that the
plutocrats’ global city of choice is Moscow
with 78 billionaire residents, followed by
New York City (58), Hong Kong (40), and
London (39).
The most attractive place for foreign
wealth appears to be the United Kingdom
with 15 different nationalities represented
in the richest of the rich there. This tops
even Switzerland (14 nationalities) and the
United States (9).
Much of the wealth of billionaires is held
offshore and their wealth is the tip of an
iceberg of hard-to-tax personal assets. In
a recent Tax Justice Network report, James
Henry estimated the overall global offshore
financial assets held by the world’s richest to
be between US$21 trillion and US$32 trillion
(out of the total global wealth, estimated at
US$231 trillion). Nearly half of these off-
shore assets are owned by the world’s rich-
est 91,000, just 0.001 per cent of the global
population.
The distribution of this wealth is a story
of extreme inequality. For each billionaire
there are millions of people who can only
ever dream of such wealth – the ratio is
only slightly smaller in the richest countries
of the world: in the USA one billionaire can
be found for every 740,000 people, while in
India one billionaire is found amongst every
26 million people.
Over time the inequalities in the distri-
bution of global wealth have become ever
more polarised. According to data by the
United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) in
2009 half of all global household wealth was
owned by the richest 2 per cent of adults. The
poorer half of the world’s population owned
just 1 per cent of the global wealth between
all of them. Their distribution is the reverse
image of the wealth maps shown here.
But it is not only wealth inequality that
becomes very apparent in these numbers.
The gender gap is large among the rich: Of
the countries with more than 10 billion-
aires, Sweden is the most equal. But even
here only 27 per cent of billionaires are
female, followed by Germany (20 per cent)
and Brazil (19 per cent). Russia, home to
the second largest number of billionaires,
only has one woman in the ranking, and
the USA is not much better with only 10
per cent of the country’s billionaires female.
Thirty-seven of the 59 countries shown
here have no female billionaires at all.
*Alaska looks very large in this map because it
is transformed in one piece with the rest of the
USA. It is more likely to be much smaller in terms
of its share of the billionaires within the country.
**Countries shaded the same colours in top and
bottom left world maps to allow comparison.
Benjamin D. Hennig and Danny Dorling map the contours of the world’s plutocracy.
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