Lee Shau Kee (photo) moved
to Hong Kong from mainland China in 1948, the year before China’s Communist
Party seized control. In 1976 he set up a property company, Henderson Land
Development, which helped to develop the tallest building on Hong Kong island.
Mr Lee is now the world’s 27th-richest person, according to Forbes,
a business magazine. He and the 26 richer individuals have a combined worth of
$1.39trn—more than the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity.
This kind
of startling comparison between the world’s most and least rich has been
popularised by Oxfam, a charity. It draws on Forbes’s regular
rankings of the world’s billionaires and the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s
annual reports on household wealth. Tony Shorrocks, the lead author of the
Credit Suisse report, is reasonably confident that the poorest half of the
world owns less than 1% of its wealth. But it is hard to be more exact than
that.
The
measurements are, however, improving. In last year’s Credit Suisse report, the
richest 1% seemed to claim more than half of the world’s wealth (see chart).
But new and improved estimates suggest the share of the one-percenters may have
peaked or levelled off. Between 2016 and 2018, it fell in Brazil, Britain,
France, Germany, India and Russia and flattened off in USA, Canada, China,
Italy and Japan.
To be a
member of the 1%, a person now needs over $870,000 in net assets. Two-fifths of
this 1% are in USA. In the past, the second-biggest contingent was always in
Japan. But this year they live in China, home to 8.4% of them (and Hong Kong
adds another 0.4%). China now has more than 1m more millionaires than the whole
of Britain.
From The Economist
