Australia: A little bit rich
/Australia is amongst the wealthiest countries in the world, with significant financial gain in 2020, Credit Suisse’s latest Global Wealth report says. In 2020, Australia achieved a $87,098 increase in wealth on a per-adult basis. Switzerland takes out the glittery top spot, with an increase of $93,772.
Credit Suisse suspected that countries wouldn’t record large household wealth increases across the pandemic, however, the combined forces of rising asset prices and currency appreciation saw the opposite occur. Belgium and Sweden gained over $66,290, while Germany, the Netherlands and the US gained an extra $53,000.
The disparity in where the wealth was distributed was huge, with the countries recording the most wealth per adult are in North America, Western Europe, the richer parts of East Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East.
China and Russia sit in the ‘intermediate wealth’ countries with mean wealth hovering between US$25,000 and US$100,000. Australia, by comparison in terms of median wealth per adult, ranks first with $315,558 (US$238,070).
Income shocks during the pandemic have varied, since high income countries can buffer the loss of labour or business income with emergency benefits and employment policies, the report says. During the crisis, some benefits were so plentiful that disposable personal income rose.
At the end of 2020 Australia had 1,805 millionaires, increasing by nearly 400 each year. The number of millionaires in Germany, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and Italy also increased, with the inflated currency appreciation against the US dollar being the main factor behind this, the report said.
