How much the top 1% of world’s richest earn in different countries
The income required to be in the “top 1%” varies greatly depending on what country you live in. To join the “richest top 1% club” in the United States requires more than $488,000, 6 times more income than in India ($77,000). An emerging market so populous that the top 1% includes more than 13 million people.
You might need the combined incomes of 12 richest one-percenters in India, a developing market, to equal 1 in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.
In much of the developed world, an annual pretax income of $200,000 to $300,000 gets you into the richest top 1% club. Interestingly, Inequality is widening even within the ranks of the top 1%.
To be among the top 1 percent in America, you needed a minimum annual pretax income of $488,000 per year before taxes. While it takes about $488,000 per year to enter the “top 1% club” in the United States, reaching the “top 0.1%” now requires an annual pretax income of more than $2 million. And the threshold for 0.01% is more than $10 million.
From China to the United States, a breakdown of the wealthiest of the wealthy. Here’s the full breakdown of the annual pre-tax income you need to be among the top 1%of earners in various countries.
The one-percenters: annual pretax income threshold to be in the top 1 percent of earners
| Rank | Country | Annual pretax income (one-percenters) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United Arab Emirates | $922,000 |
| 2 | Singapore | $722,000 |
| 3 | United States | $488,000 |
| 4 | Bahrain | $485,000 |
| 5 | Germany | $277,000 |
| 6 | United Kingdom | $248,000 |
| 7 | Australia | $246,000 |
| 8 | France | $221,000 |
| 9 | Canada | $201,000 |
| 10 | South Africa | $188,000 |
| 11 | Brazil | $176,000 |
| 12 | Italy | $169,000 |
| 13 | China | $107,000 |
| 14 | India | $77,000 |
Note: All figures are given in 2018 U.S. dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity.
To illustrate the inequality problem, here are some facts: The richest 1% own 45% of global wealth. The richest 0.003% own 11.3% of global wealth.
The world’s top 10 billionaires
| Rank | Billionaire | Net worth | Comparable GDP values of countries (in US$) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jeff Bezos | $126 billion | Morocco ($119 billion) |
| 2 | Bill Gates | $118 billion | Ecuador ($1.7 billion) |
| 3 | Bernard Arnault | $101 billion | Kenya ($98 billion) |
| 4 | Warren Buffett | $90.4 billion | Ethiopia ($90 billion) |
| 5 | Mark Zuckerberg | $80.4 billion | Guatemala ($78 billion) |
| 6 | Amancio Ortega | $75.2 billion | Venezuela ($72 billion) |
| 7 | Larry Page | $70.4 billion | Luxembourg ($70 billion) |
| 8 | Sergey Brin | $68.2 billion | Panama ($68 billion) |
| 9 | Steve Ballmer | $66.7 billion | Myanmar ($66 billion) |
| 10 | Carlos Slim | $61.9 billion | Costa Rica ($61 billion) |
The aggregate wealth of the world’s top 10 billionaires is approximately $858 billion, exceeding the GDP of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Switzerland.
In other words, the wealth of the richest 0.00000016% of the world’s population (7,762,807,450) accounts for 4% percent of America’s GDP of about 21.4 trillion.
The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, saw his fortune increase to $126 billion. Just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Morocco, a country of 35 million people.
If he were to liquidate all of his assets, Bezos could purchase all of the final goods and services supplied by Morocco in a single year.
Following the same logic, the world’s top 10 billionaires could chip in their combined assets in exchange for the annual production of all goods and services in Turkey ($743.708 billion.
