Wealth distribution tables

January 10, 2007 12:13 AM

I have a net worth of $x. Therefore y% of people in country, z, are more wealthy than I am. Where do I find tables of this information? Even just for an individual country like US etc? The more detailed the tables are for values of x the better.
posted by zaebiz to work & money (5 comments total)

The World Bank collects this data, which would be called "per-capita income distribution, by country." You need to subscribe to view it in the form you're asking for.
posted by ikkyu2 at 12:25 AM on January 10, 2007

Thanks. Looks interesting. However I am mainly looking for information on net worth and not income, and the World Bank site states:

"Unfortunately we don't have a standard way of defining wealth. Wealth requires an evaluation of all productive assets, which accumulate (and depreciate) over years. This would also include measuring not just physical capital, but also human capital (education, experience, and perhaps social organization), and natural resources. This introduces additional complications of double counting (some financial assets represent ownership rights in physical assets) and offsetting liabilities (resulting from various complicated derivative-like instruments)."

This is probably true but I have seen some groups make at attempt at it - at least for a specific country.
posted by zaebiz at 12:38 AM on January 10, 2007

Not very detailed, but I've stumbled across this 'CNNMOney Net worth comparison by age and income' article on various personal finance blogs.

Networth IQ shows you data based on a number of different factors.

A google search for compare net worth turns up a few results as well.
posted by backwards guitar at 5:06 AM on January 10, 2007

Start with the Internal Revenue Service's "Personal Wealth Statistics." If that doesn't do it, then maybe explore FedStats, "The gateway to statistics from over 100 U.S. Federal agencies."
posted by Dave 9 at 8:51 AM on January 10, 2007

I googled "household net worth".

This CNN page gives the following numbers:

30.6% of households have net worth less than $25,000
19.2% have between $25,000 and $100,000
21.6% have between $100,000 and $250,000
17.2% have between $250,000 and $500,000
8.7% have between $500,000 and $1 million
2.7% have more than $1 million

Source cited: Claritas, December 2003.

For really detailed data, see the US Survey of Consumer Finances. This article based on the 2004 survey gives the following numbers in table 3, all in thousands of dollars:

0-25%: median 1.7, mean −1.4
25-50%: median 43.6, mean 47.1
50-75%: median 170.7, mean 185.4
75-90%: median 506.8, mean 526.7
90-100%: median 1,430.1, mean 3,114.2
posted by russilwvong at 12:43 PM on January 10, 2007