Global wealth remains extremely uneven, with 10% of the world's population having 80% of the world's wealth in 2010

Despite reams of academic research into income-inequality, countless sound-bites by a plethora of governments and foundations about the need to redress income inequality, and a huge array of protests about the global wealth divide; income and wealth inequality in the world continues to grow. Using a couple of recent research reports into global wealth in 2010, the following points are worth noting:

• Global wealth rose by 8% or $9 trillion in 2010
  
  
• 0.5% of the world population has an amazing 35.6% of the world’s wealth.
  
  
• 10% of the world population has 79.3% of the world’s wealth
  
  
• 68.4% of the world’s population has only 4.2% of the world’s wealth
  
  
• North America is still the world’s richest region with nearly one-third of global wealth.
  
  
• During 2010, wealth grew the fastest in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), at 17.1%y/y.
  
  
• The combined wealth in the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America accounted for 24.4% of global wealth in 2010, up from 20.9% in 2008.
  
  
• As recently as 2008, Japan accounted for more than half of all the wealth in Asia-Pacific. In 2010, it accounted for about 44%.
  
  
• In Europe, wealth grew at a below-average rate of 4.8% in 2010.
  
  
• In 2010, the country with the fastest-growing number of millionaire households was Singapore.
  
  
• Singapore also continues to have the highest concentration of millionaire households, followed by Switzerland.
  
  
• Three of the six densest millionaire populations were in the Middle East, namely Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
  
  
• The country with the highest number of “ultra-high-net-worth” (UHNW) households, defined as those with more than $100m, is the US. Saudi Arabia had the highest concentration of UHNW households, measured per 100 000 households, followed by Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Kuwait. China experienced the fastest growth in the number of super-wealthy households in 2010.