Estimating the level and distribution of global wealth, 2000–14

Abstract

provides economic analysis and policy advice with the aim of promoting sustainable and equitable development. The Institute began operations in 1985 in Helsinki, Finland, as the first research and training centre of the United Nations University. Today it is a unique blend of think tank, research institute, and UN agency-providing a range of services from policy advice to governments as well as freely available original research.

Capitalist Systems and Income Inequality

“…This specificity of the Nordic model is reflected also in the fact that Nordic countries have high wealth inequality and low income inequality. The top decile's wealth share in Denmark, Sweden and Norway ranges between 65 and 76 percent which is significantly higher that the shares in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain or the UK which are all under 50 percent (Davies, Lluberas and Shorrocks, 2012). Fochesato and Bowles (2015) similarly argue that "Nordic exceptionalism"…”

Empirical challenges comparing inequality across countries: The case of middle-income countries from the LIS database

“…In addition to variables used in the microeconomic inequality analysis, we consider a set of macroeconomic country-level characteristics that have been shown to be significant determinants of economic inequality (e.g., Alvaredo and Gasparini 2015;Davies et al 2017;Roine et al 2009). Similarly to previous studies, our considered macroeconomic characteristics include GDP per capita, share of agriculture in the GDP, share of urban households, life expectancy, age dependency ratio, and share of government spending in GDP.…”

Comparing global inequality of income and wealth

“…Processing this sample yielded estimates of wealth distribution within each country and region, and for the world as a whole. Improvements and updates of these estimates have been reported each year since 2010 in the annual Global Wealth Report and Global Wealth Databook published by the Credit Suisse Research Institute (Davies et al 2018a(Davies et al , 2018b. Davies et al (2017) provides further details of the methodological revisions.…”

“…The wealth sample refers to net household wealth per adult and is drawn from the micro wealth database underlying the material published in Davies et al (2018aDavies et al ( , 2018b. This yields a slightly longer series covering end-of year values for 2000-17.…”

“…This line of work prompted us a decade ago to initiate similar research on the distribution of global wealth, reported first in Davies et al (2008Davies et al ( , 2011 and continued more recently in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report and Databook (see Davies et al 2018aDavies et al , 2018b. The global wealth estimates are obtained from a synthetic wealth sample representative of all adults in the world and totalling more than a million observations in each year.…”