MOSCOW: Many countries experienced wealth losses last year, including the United States, Japan, China and others, with each losing more than US$1 trillion, while Russia, Mexico, India, and Brazil topped the list of countries with the largest gains among markets, Swiss banking group UBS said in its Global Wealth Report 2023 released Tuesday.
“Wealth increases among markets were more common overall than wealth losses, but the gains were generally small in magnitude. According to our calculations, the main exceptions were Russia (up US$600 billion), Mexico (up US$655 billion), India (up US$675 billion), and Brazil (up US$1.1 trillion),” the report read.
At the same time, the US, Japan, China, Canada, and Australia experienced the largest losses in 2022, which exceeded US$1 trillion for each of the countries, according to the report.
“Heading the list of losses in 2022 is the United States, which shed US$5.9 trillion. This compares to a rise of US$19.5 trillion a year earlier and is the first break in a remarkable sequence of gains dating back to the global financial crisis.
“Losses exceeding US$1 trillion were also recorded by Japan (down US$2.5 trillion), China (down US$1.5 trillion), Canada (down US$1.2 trillion) and Australia (down US$1.0 trillion),” the document said.
The global overview of wealth disparity showed that nations with high wealth per adult (above US$100,000) are concentrated in North America, Western Europe, richer parts of East Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East, and some states in the Caribbean, the banking group added.
Additionally, China and Russia are “core members of the ‘intermediate wealth’ group” of countries with average wealth between US$25,000 and US$100,000, the UBS said.
The group also includes “more recent members of the European Union and important emerging-market economies in Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia.”
The “frontier wealth” group, with mean wealth from US$5,000 to US$25,000 per adult, covers India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as much of South America, many of the African coastal nations, and Asian countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the document said.
Countries with an average wealth of less than US$5,000 make up the final group, dominated by countries in central Africa.
The UBS added that the US topped the list of countries housing ultra-high-net-worth individuals with 123,870 people, followed by mainland China with 32,910 individuals, Germany (9,100), India (5,480), Canada (4,560), Russia (4,490), the United Kingdom (3,980), Japan (3,930), France (3,890) and Australia (3,780). – BERNAMA-SPUTNIK
