Talk:List of sovereign states by wealth inequality

Mistake in Oman

There is a mistake in the entry for Oman. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Briandaflyin (talk • contribs) 18:21, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Questionable figures

The GINI ratings given in this list are wildly different from the ones given on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality by UN and CIA sources. The list on this page also goes against common sense. China one of the most equal countries, and Sweden one of the most unequal? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.228.133.145 (talk) 11:30, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

The Gini coefficients are different from the other list, because it is a difference if you compare income or wealth. Income is what you get every month and wealth is what you save from it and accumulate in your whole life. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.61.131.202 (talk • contribs) 11:12, 7 September 2011‎

No, wealth is what you have, whether you saved it or, more likely, inherited it.

It looks like item #28 on the list is showing up as Switzerland but should be some other country? The Gini number does not look correct for Switzerland. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.210.129.202 (talk) 03:07, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

#28 is the correct value for Switzerland (for wealth distribution). Just look it up at the source (here). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.61.131.202 (talk • contribs) 11:12, 7 September 2011‎

Well then, their stats are wrong. According to them Denmark has a more unequal wealth distribution than the USA??? That is pure pie in the sky! Or maybe they are comparing statistical apples with pears.1812ahill (talk) 03:43, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Income distribution can be greatly different from wealth distribution. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:16, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

The low 10% in Denmark are recent immigrants, who have nothing, and downshifters, who voluntarily give away wealth. --Yomal Sidoroff-Biarmskii (talk) 07:41, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Again, strange data: The world's wealth gini is right at the high end (i.e. very unequal) rather than somewhere in the middle as one might expect for an 'average'. Or is it the case that the world's figure incorporates the effects of the small number of individuals who posses vast amounts of wealth in the form of such things as offshore bank accounts, foreign properties etc. i.e. stats that would not appear in an individual country's data?1812ahill (talk) 02:54, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

I think it is due to the vast amount of wealth owned by the top 10% of population. Many of them own wealth in many nations. That only shows up in global calculations. See Table 9 in the reference paper. It still find it difficult to decipher Table 9. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:14, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

@Timeshifter:@1812ahill:No, it's because the world Gini and average Gini are completely different things. An "average Gini" is an average Gini figuge for countries of the world. A "world Gini", on the other hand, is the Gini figure for the whole world as if world weras treated as a single country. Of course the Gini for the whole world would be much more than probably in any country.

The figures given for the UK do not appear to match those given in the refrenced table 9. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.40.38.10 (talk) 18:47, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Wealth distribution is *very* different from income distribution. Th figures in this page come from a United Nations University project begun in 2008 and are still the best available. The Nordic countries do score very high, which as you say, looks odd for countries that are the most equal in income distribution. But there are reasons for this. For example when the Nordics report wealth figures they also try to accurately report debt figures, so unlike with many countries the poorest individual have negative net worth (because of debts) emphasising the proportion owned by those at the top without debt. Also since they have very strong social protection, especially pensions, people are less inclined to accumulate wealth to generate an extra income when the state pension is so good. The UNU report linked as a source is very informative. Jockox3 (talk) 15:46, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Does anyone really believe that inequality in the Netherlands moved from #64 in the world (GINI of about 0.73) to #1 in the world (GINI of 0.90) in one year? Sure, housing prices went up (8% according to the CS article) but the stock market went down. Not all countries are so volatile but this does call into question the methodology. 85.144.63.10 (talk) 07:05, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

yes that seems very unlikely. that could only come from a change in how they acquire or calculate their data. and a source for the 2019 data is given in the article, but i checked the source, and i can't find anything about wealth inequality by country, only wealthy inequality for the entire world, so where did this data come from? this data is highly questionable.· Lygophile has spoken 12:16, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

It is however used as the basis for stating as fact "It is a common misconception that Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands, amongst others, have low wealth inequality[citation needed]. This is not true." Shouldn't this be changed in this light? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:1C02:2C17:AE00:5DB8:A249:69DF:26E2 (talk) 08:02, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

The data is correct, but I removed the commentary on Scandinavian countries anyway. Its unencyclopedic, the claim of a misconception of low wealth inequality needs citation, and it's deceptive. It's already caused at least one person to believe wealth inequality is not disruptive of human development, even though the Netherlands' human development growth is below-average and wealth inequality and human development growth have a correlation of -.2 (significant at the .2 level). Also, what Jockox3 said.

In the discussion of the (very hard to measure) wealth inequality numbers, somehow no one has mentioned that the GDP numbers are... odd. Some countries seem correct, but some clearly have the wrong units: e.g. China is listed as having a GDP of 18 million, one of the lowest numbers in the world. The table doesn't mention whether the numbers are in dollars or in the country's national currency, but numbers for some countries (e.g. Russia) seem to indicate those are dollars. Besides, there is likely no currency in the world that would put China's GDP at 18 million, unless its measured in tonnes of gold. The same is true for a lot of other countries: Indonesia has a GDP of $3.51 million instead of $1.15 trillion and Dominica has had its GDP reduced to 0 from its true value of $488 million. Having looked at the Credit Suisse 2019 report, the exact number listed for China (18.71) only shows up once and it is the per capita financial wealth of Latvia (in $ thousands). In other words, I have no clue how this number ended up in the table at all. Tsobolev (talk) 00:06, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Politifact mention

Politifact mentions this article in a recent fact check (http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2011/oct/14/alan-grayson/alan-grayson-says-united-states-has-fifth-most-une/) and gives us kudos for having accurate data. Good work wikipedians. D O N D E groovily Talk to me 01:46, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Great article. Thanks for bringing it up here. I am going to add it to the external links. It is good to have articles that better explain some of these arcane tables and studies. --Timeshifter (talk) 06:13, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

What happened to the Gini coefficients?

That's fine, but now the list is completely confusing. What happened to the Gini coefficients, with each reporting organization (the UN, etc.) as a separate column? Now it's gone. The resulting table is less useful than it was before. It's difficult to understand and not as accurate as it was before. The consolidation of data sources needs to be done more accurately; honestly, the previous version of this page - with its errors - was more useful than this one. 128.12.103.234 (talk) 05:28, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

I looked back at the article history and there has been only one column for the Gini coefficient as far back as the day this article was created on May 16, 2011. See the article on that day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_distribution_of_wealth&oldid=429358241

You may be thinking of List of countries by income equality. It has separate Gini columns for each reporting organization. --Timeshifter (talk) 06:29, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Reliability of main source

Looking for a reliable source of data (to cite in scientific work myself) I inspected the source more closely and was not really convinced: The table containing all the Gini-coefficients only exist in an early version (2008) of the paper, which is accessible (as far as I can see without link on the university's website) here: http://economics.uwo.ca/faculty/davies/workingpapers/thelevelanddistribution.pdf .
The 'discussion paper' on the webpage of the United Nations University and the version the first author links to on his university website, http://economics.uwo.ca/faculty/davies/workingpapers/Level_and_Distn_Global_H_W.pdf , which appeared under the same title and with the same authors in a peer reviewed journal in 2011, both contain much less countries.
Additionally, what the authors write on their sources seems a bit sparse. (But I might have missed something in one of the versions there...) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.148.63.51 (talk) 18:40, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Huge disparity between this article and the United States Article

This article lists the USA's GINI index as around 80, while the article on the [United States of America] lists it as 45 (as backed up by the CIA factbook--which might not be an unbiased source for info about America). This is not a small disagreement, it's a huge difference. Which is more accurate? Or rather, for the purposes of wikipedia, which is the more reputable source?

Erhm America more equal than Denmark? I dont think so... List is pure shite! Start over..

Citizen Premier (talk) 03:34, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

One is income (CIA), other (this) wealth. 130.234.245.120 (talk) 10:45, 1 March 2017 (UTC)anon

Denmark the most unequal about wealth and the equalest about income?

The question comes from this article and from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality. Denmark should be as unequal as Zimbabwe and Namibia concerning wealth BUT should be as equal as Sweden, Norway and Japan concerning income?

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Income & wealth are two different quantities :-D

In different countries' summary-statistics, they needn't vary in proportion to eachother, or even vary monotonically with eachother.

---

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.82.116.234 (talk) 22:38, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

The same remark can be done concerning Switzerland and the USA. I join the remarks above, some figures seem to be not reliable here. How can we trust the other figures in this table?--Joël DESHAIES (talk) 16:32, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

What fucking retard is running this page? Its all just completely wrong..

It also contradicts the map in this article. However, I will tell how THEORETICALLY wealth gini and income gini can contradict. If a rich socialist country allows immigrants from poor countries. YOMAL SIDOROFF-BIARMSKII (talk) 20:46, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't understand either. Denmark and Switzerland are some of the most socialist countries, especially Denmark.2601:640:4000:8CD0:8A63:DFFF:FEA6:9C8D (talk) 01:30, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Erm Switzerland is not a socialist country. It has low taxes and low spending on welfare as % of GDP. It is one of the most economically liberal countries in Europe! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.192.113.11 (talk) 13:56, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

Mongolia

Mongolia does not appear on my screen? Why is it missing?Kdammers (talk) 06:03, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Denmark

The Wealth GINI for Denmark was changed to 0.505 without any references. The number 0.808 can be found in APPENDIX IV of the WIDER Research Paper 2008-77 which was already referred to in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.188.248.168 (talk) 13:57, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know how WIDER calculates its GINI numbers, but these results (with Denmark as one of the countries with the most unequal wealth distributions) are in striking contrast to for instance the income GINIs for the Nordic countries found in Nordic Statistical Yearbook 2012, a direct download can be found here.

That publication has all of 5 the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) hovering around 0.25 and the EU-15 just above 0.30 (see page 57, the data are from Eurostat).

So assuming both numbers are correct, it seems like Denmark apparently has both a very equal income distribution and an extremely unequal wealth distribution.

I guess the reason may be the same as suggested for Sweden in the paper cited in the Wiki entry on the Gini coefficient: Households with zero or negative wealth.

Reasons for such zero or negative wealth maybe due to some being "technically insolvent" property owners, i.e. bankrupt if forced to sell their house/apartment. However, it should be noted that unless these individuals are actually foreclosed upon, these insolvencies represent an unrealised loss. I noted that the paper is from 2008, when Denmark was still in the grip of one of the worst property bubbles in Europe.

Other groups could be students/recent graduates with large student debts and few or no assets. In Denmark, such debt is usually government sponsored, has low interest rates and very lenient repayment schemes.

Whether Denmark has a pension system which discourage savings among certain groups, as the paper concludes on Sweden, I don't know.

Mojowiha (talk) 09:37, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

THEORETICALLY wealth gini and income gini can contradict. If a rich socialist country allows immigrants from poor countries. This, I guess, fits Scandinavia well. YOMAL SIDOROFF-BIARMSKII (talk) 20:50, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

The survey sources the paper references for Denmark seem a little odd: "Wealth tax records; see Statistics Denmark (1998) and Ohlson et al. (2006). Supplemented with private communication with Statistics Denmark in 2007." As far as I can see Ohlson et al. only published a book in 2006 titled "Earnings, Earnings Growth and Value", which does not mention Denmark or Scandinavia at all. Regardless, it seems the data used for Denmarks GINI coefficient is almost 20 years old (1996) and the sources table has a mysterious year column with no header?
This number just generally seems very odd to me and looking up the papers sources makes me doubt it even more. ANDSENS (talk) 17:32, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

World average?

How can the world average be higher than the countries that hold of 99.5% of world GDP? This page does not make any sense at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.218.158.128 (talk) 22:50, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

@85.218.158.128 I don't see a world AVERAGE in the article. I see a world TOTAL. Two completely different things. --YOMAL SIDOROFF-BIARMSKII (talk) 15:37, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

CreditSuisse has median individual wealth by country

A helpful colleague pointed out that the CreditSuisse Global Wealth Databook has compiled median individual wealth statistics by country, on pp. 93-96. Someone was looking for this somewhere on the wiki in the past few months, and it's incredibly hard to find. Given that this information is far more characteristic of a typical person's wealth than the mean values skewed by large outliers everywhere, I think it's very important and I hope we can incorporate it. I suppose I should make some kind of a table or graph based on it. Any ideas? EllenCT (talk) 20:31, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Outdated

Copied from article: The latest available known source is October 2013, https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=1949208D-E59A-F2D9-6D0361266E44A2F8, which slightly updates the 2009 https://doi.org/10.3386/w15508 by the same researchers. The following derives instead from a 2006 publication by a different group of researchers, and should be updated. --SelfishSeahorse (talk) 19:13, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Does anybody know how to update this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.155.30.232 (talk) 16:49, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

There's a published version of this NBER Working paper available here: doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02391.x. --bender235 (talk) 19:31, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

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Is poverty decreasing?

We could use some more eyes on this: Talk:List_of_common_misconceptions#poverty. Also, there is the question of whether the proposed misconception should be added to an article on poverty. --David Tornheim (talk) 02:11, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Zero Chance Any of this is Acurate

I've looked through this data--Denmark has as high of wealth inequality (almost) as Zimbabwe? Zero chance. China is second place in wealth equality? Zero chance. Half the citation links don't work. This is one of the WORST articles on wikipedia I have read and should either be deleted or revised. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.218.81.132 (talk) 18:22, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

This article is pretty accurate. Please use sources rather that just saying "you're wrong". You can always provide another list of wealth gini coefficients.Lucas12233 (talk) 15:05, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Title

"Wealth equality"? Gini is a measure of inequality; the higher the Gini, the higher the inequality. The title should be changed to "List of countries by wealth inequality". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pennythugginit (talk • contribs) 23:01, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Correct. Executed. JBX (talk) 10:42, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Incorrect numbers for GDP

The numbers for GDP in this article are definitely incorrect. I've tried (and failed) to edit the table itself, so I call on moderators who are more experienced with the interface than I am. For confirmation of the data being incorrect, you can sort the table by nominal GDP and find that China has one of the lowest GDP levels in the world, at just $18 million. The same is true for many other countries in the list, e.g. Indonesia (30 million instead of 1.15 trillion). Also, the column doesn't specify which currency the GDP is in (presumably USD), but I doubt there is any currency in which China's GDP is 18 million.

I've written about this in a section above and didn't get a response, so I hope creating a new section will be more effective, because this is quite a significant error.

Tsobolev (talk) 20:57, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

The above seems fixed but now where is a problem at the lower end. Luxembourg with 0.01 million when it has 94,000 million - 0.01 seems to be accurate if it is in trillion.

Atheist723 (talk) 16:17, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Original research?

I believe the material I deleted is WP:OR by Jchw1994. If it is mentioned in the WP:RS, then it can be restored. --David Tornheim (talk) 21:41, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Correct, the conclusions were ones I made based on the cited material. Is there a way to point out the inconsistencies of the cited material as proof of inaccurracy? Or at least create a disclaimer? Jchw1994 (talk) 21:52, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

For reference, this was my observation: However, these calculations may be inaccurate. In 2019 the Netherlands was calculated to have the highest Gini coefficient. The Global Wealth databook for 2019 showed a Netherlands 2018 median GDP of 30,057 USD, while the 2018 Databook showed 114,935 USD and the 2022 Databook showed 111,333 USD for the same year. The deviation in the Netherlands data is persistent throughout the 2019 Databook. Jchw1994 (talk) 22:01, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

@Jchw1994: I have not looked at the data or at the sources, only the writing that looked to me like WP:OR. If your claims are true, you'd need a WP:RS to report these conclusions in the article. If true--again I have not verified--it might be valuable in a discussion of just how reliable the source is, like you did above. If you have a better source that does not make this error, you could always suggest it. You could also suggest that because of the problems you mention, that the material that relies on the source should be curtailed or deleted. If you do that, I would suggest identifying the editor who added the material and/or reference, and see if they have any thoughts before you delete it. If you don't know how to find who added it, please let me know, and I can tell you how to do that. The editor who added the source may be aware of other sources or limitations on the source they used. --David Tornheim (talk) 22:34, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Income, not wealth, Gini coefficient give for Sweden

Values for Sweden has been changed according to sources other than the Credit Suisse report. But all the sources provide values for income, not wealth inequalities.

In the discussion there are good points on why some countries might have low income inequality but high Gini coefficient when it comes to wealth. I buy the argument on pension money not being private, I also know that in Sweden people often have a right to an apartment, but do not formally own it (so called "Bostadsrätt").

Maybe a discussion paragraph is needed. But by no means should we mix different kinds of data. TK synantropijny (talk) 11:07, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

PS: From the Credit Suisse report itself:

"Household samplesurveys are employed in almost all countries.The exceptions are the Nordic countries(Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden), which use data from tax and other registers covering the entire population. For all other countries, except the United States, the wealth shares of the top groups are expected to be understated because wealthy households are less likely to respond, and because the financial assets that are of greater importance to the wealthy – e.g. equities and bonds – are especially likely to be under-reported. " TK synantropijny (talk) 11:11, 23 July 2024 (UTC)