(Top 10)Countries with the Most Millionaires

Business Week via Yahoo! ^ | June 20, 2010 | Venessa Wong

[greatdefender]

As the financial markets rebounded in 2009 and developing markets continued to grow, lost wealth around the world returned. Despite the volatile global economy, many households gained or regained millionaire status last year, according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group. The study finds global wealth increased 11.5 percent in 2009, to $111.5 trillion, just short of 2007 levels. When measuring assets under management -- cash deposits, money market funds, listed securities, and onshore and offshore assets, but not wealth attributed to investors' own businesses, residences, or luxury goods -- the U.S. continued to lead with more than 4.7 million "millionaire households," followed by Japan and China.

Singapore, a country with a population of about 5.1 million, had the greatest concentration of millionaire households: 11.4 percent of the country's total. Wealth may have returned to precrisis levels last year, but confidence has not yet. BCG expects global wealth to grow an average 6 percent annually through 2014, led by robust economies in the Asia-Pacific, but Peter Damisch, a BCG partner and a co-author of the report, says people are still hesitant about investing. Many moved assets from private banks to state-guaranteed retail banks and are still waiting for either new opportunities or new confidence to reinvest, says Damisch.

[Doogle]

no arab countries listed?

[PugetSoundSoldier]

They don’t share the wealth. In most Arabic countries you find insanely wealthy sheiks and their immediate families, and the average person is quite poor. And there is essentially zero movement between those social classes.

You either have, or you have not. And there’s no real way to move from a have-not to a have.

After all, allah decreed it!

[snowsislander]

If the "Boston Consulting Group" is giving the number of millionaire Japanese households as only 1.2 million, then I wouldn't trust the veracity of any of their numbers. That number is so absurdly low that I cannot imagine that any of their other numbers is any more accurate. Cripes, there are more individual residences than that in the Tokyo area alone, and relatively few of them are worth less than $1 million, and many, many are worth multiple million dollars.

And then consider the tens of millions of small, family-owned businesses that populate the Japanese business market. These family businesses are often ran very conservatively, and equally often don't borrow any money for short-term financing. These family-owned businesses very often own the land and buildings where the businesses are housed (heck, often the owners live above the working areas in the same buildings.)

For that matter, many of the omnipresent apartment buildings in Japan are also family-owned, and these buildings are generally worth quite a bit of money.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

I would take all those numbers of a grain of salt - international income and wealth comparisons are difficult for a number of reasons.

That said, one of the more interesting numbers was the proportion of wealth held by “millionaire households”, epecially in the larger developed countries.