Profile of the super rich in China: A social space analysis

Abstract

Global inequalities in terms of income and wealth are increasing rapidly and are likely to continue to do so. Two main forces drive this phenomenon. First, the proportion of a nation's total wealth held privately has increased considerably in almost every country since the "second great transformation" (Burawoy, 2000) of the 1990s. This increase is the result of the transformation of public wealth into private wealth and is particularly evident in

Top Wealth and Its Historical Origins: Identifying Entrenched Fortunes by Linking Rich Lists over 100 Years

“…Despite growing academic and public interest in wealth concentration, we know only little about the largest privately held fortunes. We contribute to the nascent literature on top wealth (e.g., Baselgia and Martínez 2022;Freund and Oliver 2016;Korom et al 2017;Lu et al 2021;Toft and Hansen 2022) by generating a novel dataset on the 1,032 largest fortunes in Germany 2019 and by examining the historical origins of today's top wealth in three steps.…”

“…This study uniquely contributes to the literature on top wealth. By building a dataset on the basis of rich lists from the beginning of the twentieth century, rich lists from today, and genealogical data we generate descriptive knowledge about the largest fortunes in Germany, complementing prior research on top wealth in China, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States (e.g., Baselgia and Martínez 2022; Kaplan and Rauh 2013; Korom et al 2017; Lu, Fan, and Fu 2021; Toft and Hansen 2022). Germany is an especially interesting case to study the historical origins of today’s top fortunes.…”