10 Countries Where Average Worker Is Furthest From Top 1%

Related: Top 10 Countries for the Ultra-Wealthy: 2021

The world’s richest people own 43% of overall global wealth, according to Inequality.org, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies that tracks inequality-related news and views.

Researchers at money.co.uk wanted to know exactly how long an average employee in 27 countries would need to work to match the wealth of the elite in their country. To simplify the calculations, they made the unrealistic assumption that the workers would save 100% of their income.

The researchers analyzed data on Oct. 11 from the latest Knight Frank wealth report in order to come up with the required financial value a person would need to have to join the top 1% in each country, and they acquired adjusted net national income per capita statistics from the World Bank for 2019.

They then divided the required wealth by the net national income to establish an estimated number of years and months it would take the average person to reach the required wealth of the country’s richest earners. For these simplified calculations, they assumed that the level of wealth required would not change over the time it took to save the total amount.

See the gallery for the 10 countries where average workers are furthest behind the richest cohort.