MCLC: China's 1 percent vs America's 1 percent

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: sean macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
Subject: China's 1 percent vs America's 1 percent
***********************************************************

A Beijing University study on wealth distribution was released
recently. This Bloomberg article puts the findings in a comparative
context vis-a-vis the US. An internal link to a Beijing wanbao (北京晚报
Beijing Evening News) article on the Beijing University study is here:

http://bjwb.bjd.com.cn/html/2014-07/26/content_200825.htm

Sean

==========================================================

Source: Business Week (7/28/14):
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-28/chinas-one-percent-vs-dot-a
mericas-one-percent

China’s 1 Percent vs. America’s 1 Percent
By Christina Larson July 28, 2014

A new study by Peking University’s Social Science Research Center
pulls back the curtain a bit on China’s überwealthy. The richest 1
percent of Chinese households control more than a third of the
country’s wealth, according to the July 26 study.

Most of that is tied up in real estate. In 2012, the study says, real
estate accounted for 70 percent of all household wealth in China. (The
bottom quarter of households, tellingly, control just 1 percent of
China’s wealth.) The outsize reliance on real estate as an investment
vehicle for both individuals and enterprises is troubling, given
widespread concerns about a property bubble. In June, apartment prices
fell in 55 of China’s 70 largest cities, according to China’s National
Bureau of Statistics. In the southeastern city of Hangzhou, property
prices dipped 1.7 percent that month.

But how do China’s rich stack up against America’s? The U.S. Internal
Revenue Service analyzes income, not household net wealth, and in
2012, America’s richest 1 percent took home 19.3 percent of household
income. But incomes rose almost 20 percent for the top 1 percent,
whereas they inched up just 1 percent for the bottom 99 percent.

Recently, economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at
Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics
estimated the distribution of household wealth in the U.S. They
calculated “how much property different strata of society owned by
looking at the income that was generated by that property,” as my
colleague Peter Coy reported. The richest 1 percent of Americans, they
found, control 40 percent of the country’s wealth, and the top 0.1
percent control more than a fifth—which would mean wealth in the U.S.
is still more concentrated than in China.

Larson is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.