In Defence of Marxism

The World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University has produced a report that shows that the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth. The same report reveals that the poorer half of the world population owns barely 1% of global wealth.

The way they calculated wealth was by taking what people own, less what they owe - their debts. The analysis reveals striking divergences in wealth between different countries. As we could expect, it found that wealth is concentrated heavily in North America, Europe and some countries like Japan and Australia. All these account for 90% of household wealth.

In the less developed countries, land and farm assets represent a larger part of wealth, reflecting the agricultural nature of those economies. Strikingly, it discovered that some people in the developed countries have more debt than assets. This puts them among the poorest in the world in terms of household wealth.