Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Credit Suisse Wealth Report 2016: Average wealth per adult rose 1.4 per cent to US$276,885 (S$394,000)

The annual Credit Suisse report is out for 2016. Some data that are of more interest to Singapore are as follows:













2016 Average wealth of a Singaporean: US$276,885 (S$394,000) 
The report also broke down this value to:
Financial wealth per adult: US$180,414
Non-financial wealth per adult: US$151,239 
Debt per adult: US$54,768

2015 data for reference: 
Average wealth: US$273,085
Financial wealth per adult: US$176,978
Non-financial wealth per adult: US$150,145 
Debt per adult: US$54,039

Non-Financial wealth comprises of mainly housing and land owned.

My comments: 
The average income has rose by 1.39 % from 2015 to 2016.
A large part of the average wealth actually comes from the property (in Singapore's case, it should be the HDB for most people)


2016 Median wealth of a Singaporean: US$101,386 (S$143,600)


2015 data for reference: 
Median US$104,094

My comments:
Even though average income has rose by 1.39%, median income has fell by 2.60%!!
It seems that gap between the rich and poor have yet widen again. But how is the wealth distribution now? Digging further into the report, I found this: 

Wealth distribution:  
Country
Adults (thousands)
Mean wealth of adult (USD)
Median wealth of adult (USD)
Distribution of adults (%) by
wealth range (USD)
under
10,000
10,000 -
100,000
100,000 –
1 million
over 1
million
Singapore
4,111
276,885
101,386
17.6
32.2
46.5
3.7

My comments:
46.5% of Singaporeans fall under the 100k to 1M (USD) wealth range. The median income (101k USD) is slightly higher than the lower value of this range. With a 49.8% whose wealth is below 100k USD, the numbers here make sense
A large portion (17.6%) of Singaporeans have a wealth of less than 10k

Also, I feel it would be meaningful if we can view the age breakdown for each band of wealth range. The data above do not show how long the individuals has been accumulating the wealth they are holding. But for median wealth to drop by 2.60%, it is somewhat disturbing.


Sources:
http://publications.credit-suisse.com/index.cfm/publikationen-shop/research-institute/

http://www.todayonline.com/business/singaporeans-average-wealth-increases-us277000-credit-suisse-report


4 comments:

money-cent said...

I think there is another point not mentioned clearly. This report only included their wealth in sg. Some ppl might be owning much wealth overseas.

Urug said...

GDP slowed. MOM labour report says redundancies and unemployment rising. Yet average income rising. So interesting.

Mad Stranger said...

Hi money-cent,
I didn't see any mention of "overseas wealth" in the report. But I guess you are right. It will be hard to track these "overseas wealth". If this is included, the gap between the rich and poor will be even greater.

Mad Stranger said...

Hi Urug,
The report is on wealth, not income. For wealth, even though average increased, the median wealth dropped. For income comparison, I think we need to drill into the statistics released by IRAS. But I don't think they contain info for annual income lesser than 20k (as the first 20k is non taxable)