Wealth Distribution, the Financial Crisis and Entrepreneurship

Globally, wealth is very unequally distributed, both within countries and between countries. The UNUWIDER project on Personal Assets from a Global Perspective has found for instance that the richest 10 percent of adults in the world own 85 percent of global household wealth. Of these individuals, almost half live in the US and Japan. The common measure of inequality, the Gini.coefficient, ranges between 0.65 to 0.75 for the distribution of within country wealth. Another feature of the distribution of wealth is that the rich (advanced countries) hold greater proportions of wealth in financial assets than poorer or middle income households (countries) where wealth is predominantly held in real assets such as land, houses and farm assets (see the article by Davies, Sandström, Shorrocks and Wolff in the WIDER Angle 2006. 2 (1.4 megabytes).