Richest 1% own 46% of global wealth: Credit Suisse

Average global household wealth on the basis of total adult population has reached $51,600, but this is spread very unevenly, with the richest 1 per cent owning 46 per cent of that wealth.

The top 10 per cent own 86 per cent of the wealth, Credit Suisse said in its World Wealth Report.

Aggregate global household wealth has increased by 4.9 per cent over the past year and by 68 per cent over the past 10 years to reach $241 trillion, the report said.

And that number is poised to grow over the next five years by 40 per cent, reaching $334 trillion, analysts at the Credit Suisse Research Institute said, adding that the United States accounted for nearly three quarters of the increase.

Credit Suisse projects the number of trillionaires to increase to 11 and the number of millionaires to reach a billon, equivalent to 20 per cent of the world's adult population - a sign that even as the tepid economic recovery plays out, households are still accumulating wealth.

''Two generations ahead, future extrapolation of current wealth growth rates yields almost a billion millionaires, equivalent to 20 per cent of the total adult population. If this scenario unfolds, then billionaires will be commonplace, and there is likely to be a few trillionaires too – eleven according to our best estimate.''

North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern countries are the richest nations, with a concentration of wealth per adult of more than $100,000, according to the report.

Switzerland tops the list with average adult wealth of $513,000, followed by Australia ($403,000), Norway ($380,000) and Luxembourg ($315,000).

By contrast two-thirds of the world's adult population have assets worth less than $10,000 and together account for just 3 per cent of global wealth.

The number of millionaires worldwide has risen by nearly two million since mid-2012, the report said, adding that the vast majority of them are in the United States.

Credit Suisse said there were 98,700 individuals with net worth exceeding $50 million, more than half of them in the United States. Europe ranked second, home to nearly 25,000.

By contrast, Japan lost 1.2 million millionaires during the same period.

The rise in US wealth has been driven by a recovery in house prices and a bull equity market.

In Japan, the central bank's aggressive monetary policy drove the yen/dollar exchange rate down by 22 per cent, leading to a drop in household wealth of $5.8 trillion this year alone, equivalent to 20 per cent of Japanese net worth, the report said.

Despite its strong economic growth over the past decades, Chinese hold barely 9 per cent of global wealth while accounting for more than a fifth of the global adult population.

For Africa and India, the population share exceeds the wealth share by a factor of ten, according to the report.

The so-called BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - are each estimated to have around 5,830 such ultra-high net worth individuals.

The number of billionaires in the BRICs has risen from 5 per cent of the world's total in 2000 to 19 per cent in 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of billionaires in China alone rose from 1 to 64, the study showed.