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In other countries, ranking among the richest 1% takes a long string of zeros in the bank account.

According to The Wealth Report 2021, compiled by Knight Frank’s research teams and released in February, in South Africa, you’ll need to hold a net wealth of $180 000 (around R2,55 million).

Not chump change, but it’s certainly not getting you a private jet with a nice bottle of bubbles, unless you’re chartering one and using the pictures for clout on social media.

In Switzerland and America, the top 1% have wealth of $5,1 million and $4,4 million, respectively.

Sitting atop the list of what’s needed to crack the nod is Monaco, where you’ll need a whopping $7,9 million to make the cut.

According to the same report, if you want to make the top 0,1%, you’ll need $22,2 million in Monaco, $25,1 million in the US, and $16,6 million in Switzerland.

Now we’re hitting private jet territory.

What that report didn’t cover was how much wealth is concentrated among each country’s wealthiest 1%, and for that, we turn to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report for 2021.

The report offers a closer look at Nigeria and South Africa – the two largest economies in sub-Saharan Africa – and how they’ve fared over the past year or so.

Using a variety of macroeconomic indicators, and using the African continent as a yardstick, here’s what we can see:

Despite having a far smaller population than Nigeria, we have greater total wealth, as well as US dollar millionaires.

However, our wealth inequality is greater than Nigeria, and the continent on the whole, because that wealth is concentrated in fewer hands:

The sharper rise in the Gini coefficient [a measure of the distribution of income across a population developed by statistician Corrado Gini in 1912] in South Africa is explained by rising wealth inequality lower down in the distribution: the share of the bottom 90%, for example, fell from 29.7% to 20.1%.

BusinessTech breaks down that disparity in simple terms:

South Africa’s wealth is highly concentrated among the super-rich. Approximately 80% of total wealth is held by 10% of the adult population – but the biggest chunk of this is held by the top 1%…

Wealth per adult in the top 1% averages $828,000;  among the top 10%, it averages $162,000.

In South Africa, the top 1% holds in excess of 40% of the country’s total wealth, and the top 10% holds just shy of 80% of total wealth.

The Credit Suisse report found that globally, total wealth grew by 7,4%, and wealth per adult reached a record high of $79 952 per adult.

Contrast that to South Africa, with an average median wealth of $4 523.

The report also breaks down the change in household wealth by region:

A particularly bad period for Latin America and India.

Finally, one more table, focused on which regions are churning out the most US dollar millionaires:

Switzerland bossing it.

You can dig around the full report here.

[sources:creditsuisse&bustech]