How Many Millionaires Are There in the World?

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed)
Feb 22nd 2011 at 10:01AM

How many millionaires are there in the world today? It depends on what you mean by "millionaire". The Economist reports that there are two different "official" methods for determining who makes the cut. Capegemini, a financial consultancy, defines a millionaire as anyone with investable assets of $1 million or more – meaning that they actually have over a million dollars as that doesn't include the home in which they live, for instance. By this measure there are about 10 million millionaires on the planet, according to Capegemini and Merrill Lynch. Mega bank Credit Suisse uses a different definition, however, denoting anyone whose net assets exceed $1 million a millionaire. In those terms, there are 24.2 million millionaires on the planet – about 0.5% of the world's adult population, or more than the entire population of Australia. 41% of them live in the U.S., 10% in Japan and 3% in China.

Tags: Merrill Lynch, millionaire, millionaires, money, wealth