Zucman et al. on inequality:
"The key difference between Europe and many other parts of the world (including Russia and
the United States) is that wealth inequality is significantly lower in Europe today than it was
a century ago. While wealth inequality appears to have returned to its level of a century ago
in both the United States and Russia, European countries have a more developed patrimonial
middle class which did not exist on the eve of World War 1. The high share of wealth owned by
the middle-class is largely the product of a number of policies adopted in the post-World War
II decades, including nationalizations, rent control, and tax policies which led to a historical
compression of wealth inequality during the mixed-economy regime of the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s."
"At the global level, wealth is highly concentrated: the top 10% owns more than 70% of
the total wealth in China, Europe, and the United States combined; the bottom 50% owns less
than 2%; and the middle 40% (which could be described as the global wealth middle-class) owns
less than 30%. Wealth concentration would probably be even higher if Latin America, Africa,
and the rest of Asia were included in the analysis, as most people in these regions would be in the
poorer parts of the distribution. Wealth is substantially more concentrated than income. This
result comes from both tails of the distribution. In most countries the share of wealth owned by
the bottom 50% is close to 0% (while the share of income earned by the bottom 50% is usually
around 15%–25%). That is, on aggregate, total assets for the bottom 50% are typically about
as large as total debts. At the top end by contrast, the wealthiest individuals own fortunes that
are very large compared to average wealth (within country, the average wealth of the top 0.1%
is typically 100 to 200 times larger than average wealth in the entire population today)."
"Zucman (2013, 2014) estimates that 8% of the world’s household financial
wealth—the equivalent of 10% of world GDP—is held offshore, or $5.6 trillion on the eve of the
world financial crisis in 2007. A similar estimate is obtained by Pellegrini et al. (2016). This
order of magnitude is at the low-end of the scale of available estimates. The OECD calculates
that households owned a total of $5 to $7 trillion offshore in 2007 (Owens, 2007); based on
interviews with wealth managers, the Boston Consulting Group (2008) finds $7.3 trillion that
same year; Cap Gemini and Merrill Lynch (2002) have a $8.5 trillion estimate for 2002; Palan,
Murphy, and Chavagneux (2010) write that “the global rich held in 2007 approximately $12
trillion of their wealth in tax havens;” and Henry (2012) finds $21 to $32 trillion as of 2010. One
limitation of Zucman’s (2013) methodology is that it only captures financial wealth, disregarding
valuables, works of art, real estate, and other non-financial assets, which may explain part of
the gap with other studies."
https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/AJZ2017.pdfsidd
