Wow. Here it is. As good a quantification of the distribution of wealth around the world as one could hope for. The study, under the title above, is online here. The authors are James B. Davies, Susanna Sandström, Anthony Shorrocks and Edward N. Wolff.
As the authors note, the concentration of wealth is, if anything, underestimated in the data they start with. The distribution is shown in a couple of different ways.
Table 1 shows the percentages of wealth shown by various quantiles. Let's start with the percentage of wealth held by the bottom 50% of households in selected countries:
Australia 9.0% Canada 6.0%
China 14.4% Denmark -17.6% (a lot of debt for a lot of people!)
Finland 7.4% Germany 3.9%
India 8.1% Indonesia 5.1%
Ireland 12.2% Japan 13.9%
South Korea 12.3% Norway 10.4%
Spain 13.2% Sweden -4.8%
United Kingdom 5.0% USA 2.8%
Other than two Scandinavian Countries, the US has the lowest percentage of its wealth held by the bottom half of its wealth spectrum. Does this tell us anything about the success of capitalism (as we practice it, anyway) as a tool for sharing wealth justly or logically?
Here are similar figures for the bottom 90% in each country:
Australia 56.0% Canada 47.0%
China 58.6% Denmark 23.6%
Finland 57.7% France 39.0%
Germany 55.7% India 47.1%
Indonesia 34.6% Ireland 57.7%
Italy 51.5% Japan 60.7%
South Korea 56.9 New Zealand 48.3%
Norway 49.6% Spain 58.1%
Sweden 41.4% United Kingdom 44.0%
USA 30.2%
Only Denmark's bottom 90% have less of their nation's wealth than America's bottom 90%.
For more detail on America's bottom 90%, see http://www.wealthandwant.com/issues/wealth/90-9-1_Tables.html
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