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Researching and Reporting on Global Wealth – Two Interviews with Anthony Shorrocks

30 October 2014

by Roger Williamson

In this interview Professor Anthony Shorrocks describes the methodology to research global household wealth, developed by him and colleagues when he was Director of UNU-WIDER. The initial 2006 study with its headline that 2% of households owned half of global wealth created such media interest that the UNU-WIDER website crashed twice in one day. Shorrocks goes on to describe further refinements of the work and its development into the annual Global Wealth Report published by Credit Suisse Research Institute. The 2014 Report has just been published. 

Current patterns on wealth inequality in the world

In the second interview Professor Shorrocks explains current findings on the patterns of wealth distribution within countries and suggests reasons for the growing inequality in many countries. He continues the analysis by showing that the rise of China and other emerging countries has an equalizing effect for global wealth.

For more interviews, see UNU-WIDER channel on Youtube.