Some 10 per cent of the five billion adult people in the world today own 86 per cent of all its household wealth, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report and Databook that was issued last week. The report states that some 3.2 billion adults in the world own virtually nothing, while 32 million people, about one per cent of the world's adult population, own $98 trillion, or 41 per cent of all household wealth. Some 98,700 people, described as “ultra-high net worth”, own more than $50 million, and of these 33,900 are worth over $100 million. Half of these rich people live in the United States. Egyptian wealth ranges from $5,000 to $25,000 per adult, which makes the country a “frontier wealth” state. This category covers the largest area of the world today and includes most of the most heavily populated countries, such as China, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines and Iran. Only 22,250 Egyptians have fortunes that exceed $1 million, with six billionaires among them. In comparison, the average wealth of the adult Egyptian citizen reached $7,285 in 2013. The wealth of the average Egyptian citizen is generally divided into $2,619 in financial wealth and $4,848 in non-financial wealth, while debt per adult is $370. Egyptian wealth also declined over recent years, which the report attributes to the devaluation of the Egyptian pound by 15 per cent, the fourth-worst decline in a national currency this year. “Much of the wealth decline in Argentina, Egypt, South Africa and Brazil is due to currency depreciation versus the dollar,” the report says. Moreover, a drop in the market value of financial assets by 7.8 per cent has reduced the nation's wealth as a whole. The report puts Egypt in the lower-middle income group, with GDP per capita in 2013 at $3,094 and a tiny share of world GDP at 0.37 per cent. The country's share of world wealth in 2013 reached 0.16 per cent. Regarding personal wealth, the report draws on the records of the world's billionaires reported on by the US Forbes magazine in 2013. According to Forbes, six businessmen in Egypt, mainly members of the Sawiris and Mansour families, are among the richest people in the world. The six own and run companies in the construction, automotive, communications and media sectors. The net worth of the six businessmen is equivalent to 4.3 per cent of Egypt's total wealth, valued at LE2.7 trillion ($400 billion). The richest man in Egypt is Nassef Sawiris, worth $6.5 billion, who runs Orascom Construction Industries, Egypt's largest publicly-traded company. He ranks as the 182nd richest person in the world and is the fourth richest man in Africa. Nassef's elder brother, Naguib Sawiris, at $2.5 billion net worth, built the Orascom Telecom, Media and Technology company and recently sold nearly all his shares in the Russian telecoms giant VimpelCom. He ranks as the 589th richest person worldwide, and the ninth richest in Africa. Mohamed Mansour, Africa's 10th-richest man with a net worth of $2.2 billion, comes from a family that works in different businesses ranging from banks to retail. The family also owns the Egyptian Metro supermarkets chain, and one of Mansour's companies is the largest distributor of General Motors vehicles in the world. The head of the Sawiris family, Onsi Sawiris, who has a net worth of $2 billion, competes with Yaseen Mansour in the fourth and fifth rank of Egypt's richest people. The two men take joint 22nd place in the listing of the Arab world's richest men. Yaseen Mansour, with a net worth of $2 billion, is the youngest of three Mansour brothers. Youssef Mansour, the 24th richest Arab, has a net worth of $1.95 billion and is the eldest son of the Mansour family. The authors of the report, Anthony Shorrocks and Jim Davies, say that global wealth has reached a new record of $241 trillion, almost five per cent higher than last year, with the US accounting for most of the rise. Global averages are at a new high of $51,600 per adult, but the distribution of wealth is still scandalously uneven. While the report does not contain new information, since several UN reports and World Bank studies have already reached the same conclusions concerning the unequal distribution of wealth, it says that there has been hardly any mobility of wealth over the generations. 87 per cent of people stay either rich or poor, hardly moving up or down on the wealth pyramid. The report concludes that global wealth is expected to rise by nearly 40 per cent over the next five years, reaching $334 trillion by 2018. Emerging markets will be responsible for 29 per cent of that growth, although they account for just 21 per cent today. At the other end of the spectrum, the World Bank has released its State of the Poor report, which charts world levels of poverty. According to the report, approximately 1.2 billion people are now extremely poor, or living on less than $1.25 a day, one-third of them being children. However, the Bank says that the number of people living in extreme poverty has sharply declined over the past three decades. There were 721 million fewer people living in extreme poverty in 2010 than in 1981, taking dollar values at purchasing power parity. Egypt has seen higher rates of poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition over the past three years, according to a report issued jointly by the World Food Programme, the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics, and the International Food Policy Research Institute in May. The report states that about 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 per cent of the population, suffered from a lack of food in 2011, compared to 14 per cent in 2009. Poverty rates in urban areas increased from 11 per cent in 2009 to more than 15 per cent in 2011, which includes about 3.5 million people in Greater Cairo, while rural Upper Egypt continues to record the highest rates of poverty. The report states that the poor spend more than 50 per cent of their total incomes on food, which leaves them more susceptible to fluctuations in food prices despite their dependence on less expensive and less nutritionally valuable foods.
