MUMBAI: Total wealth in India has tripled over the past decade to $3.5 trillion and could further increase to $6.4 trillion by 2015, says a report on global wealth by investment bank Credit Suisse.
Relative to the rest of the world, the distribution of wealth in India is heavily biased towards the lower end of the wealth pyramid, with the proportion of adults having wealth below $1,000 roughly double the global average, says the report.
At the other end of the scale, a very small proportion of the adult population (0.4%) owns more than $100,000 on average.
However, this group has been increasing fairly quickly in recent years and the rate of growth is expected to rise in future if Indias economy continues on its current trend, it said.
Indias economy has grown at an average 8% over the past four years, and is estimated to grow 8.5% this fiscal according to RBI estimates. From a macro perspective, the CS report has found that the global wealth currently held by 4.4 billion adults has increased 72% since 2000 to reach $195 trillion.
The investment bank expects the global wealth to grow 61% to $315 trillion by 2015, driven by robust economic expansion in emerging markets. The middle segment of the wealth pyramid is composed of one billion individuals who are located in the fastest-growing economies of the world and who hold one-sixth or $32 trillion of global wealth.
In total, almost 60%, or 587 million, of individuals in the middle segment of the wealth pyramid are located in Asia-Pacific. China stands out as the third-largest wealth generator in the world, behind US and Japan, and is 35% ahead of the wealthiest European country, France .
Osama Abbasi, chief executive, Asia-Pacific, Credit Suisse , is of the view that Asia-Pacific countries, which now make up the bulk of the worlds middle class of emerging consumers, are driving the growth of the worlds wealth. China is the third-largest wealth market in the world. Economic expansion in other key markets in Asia-Pacific means that today growth in average household wealth per adult is up to 10 times the global growth rate, he said.
China stands out as the third-largest wealth generator in the world, with total household wealth of $16.5 trillion, behind only the US ($54.6 trillion) and Japan ($21 trillion). Furthermore, Chinas wealth is almost five times that of Indias.
Wealth has also surged in other emerging markets in Asia-Pacific, especially India and Indonesia . While the total wealth of India has tripled in a decade to $3.5 trillion, Indonesias has grown five-fold to $1.8 trillion and is expected to grow as impressively taking it to over $3 trillion by 2015.
The report estimates that there are more billionaires in Asia-Pacific than in Europe. At the top of the wealth pyramid, there are over 1,000 billionaires globally, of which 245 are in Asia-Pacific, 230 are in Europe and 500 in North America. Moving down the wealth pyramid, there are 80,000 ultra high net worth individuals (average wealth per adult above $50 million). Of the 24 million other high net worth individuals (average wealth per adult of $1 million to $50 million), just over 800,000 are in China, around 170,000 are in India and over four million are in the rest of Asia-Pacific. Below this, more than 330 million individuals have average wealth per adult of $100,000 to $1 million.
India's wealth triples in a decade to $3.5 trillion - The Economic Times