A new report claims that global wealth will increase to $629 trillion within the next five years and make progress toward decreasing global wealth inequality.
Key Details
- The annual Global Wealth Report is a yearly study published by Credit Suisse and UBS and was released this year on Tuesday.
- As it claims, increases in personal holdings of assets—real estate, stock, shares, etc.—will grow 38% in the next several years.
- This is an improvement from 2022, seeing an overall 2.4% decline in global wealth, largely centered in countries in Europe and North America.
- Reuters notes that this marks the first fall in net global household wealth since the 2008 financial crisis.
- The uptake is thanks to improvements in countries like Russia, Mexico, India, Brazil, China, and South Africa—expecting to see a roughly 30% rise in wealth by 2027.
Why It’s Important
The Global Wealth Report is positive news for the world, which continues to grapple with widespread poverty. This is not a new state of affairs, as the world has always suffered from tremendous inequality, disease, food instability, and crushing poverty.
However, the growing global economy has gone a long way to improving standards of living for people across the world, lifting millions of ordinary people out of crushing poverty and improving their lives. The report additionally hopes that this massive wealth increase will be beneficial to all and will help address fears of growing inequality between the richest and poorest people.
“Global median wealth, arguably a more meaningful indicator of how the typical person is faring, did in fact increase by 3% in 2022 in contrast to the 3.6% fall in wealth per adult,” says the wealth report.
As the 2021 World Inequality Report shows, the total global household wealth controlled by billionaires increased from 2% in 2020 to 3.5% in 2021 due to the pandemic. A 2023 report from Oxfam claims that the richest 1% of earners accumulated two-thirds of new wealth generated during the pandemic.
“The COVID crisis has exacerbated inequalities between the very wealthy and the rest of the population,” says Inequality Report author Lucas Chancel.
