Private wealth in the Africa-Middle East region has increased by 2.7% in 2015 to $8 trillion according to the “Global Wealth 2016” report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), an American strategy consulting firm.
Private wealth which includes all financial assets of households, property excluded, thus grew relatively less than in 2014 (3.8%) as commodity prices plunged and stock markets performed poorly, in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria namely, two countries that regroup close to one third of the region’s private wealth.
The wealth of households from Africa and middle eastern African nations includes at 50% bank and cash deposits. The rest is equally divided into share and bond placements.
In detail, households with more than a million dollars hold 44% of all of the region’s private wealth. In 2015, the wealth of affluent homes (more than $100 million) is the one to have increased the most in the Africa-Middle East region.
Global private wealth was $167.8 trillion in 2015, up 2% from the year before. The Asia-Pacific region was the one with the highest growth during the past year (+13.4%) ahead of Latin America (+7%), Eastern Europe (+6.7%), Japan (+4.3%), Middle East and Africa (2.7%) and North America (1.8%).
“Uncertainty about the future of the European Union and continued low commodity prices weighed on equity and bond markets despite a generally promising start to the year,” the report said.
The North America region is the one with the greatest number of wealthy homes and should remain as that until 2020. The Western Europe region comes second but could be beaten by the Asia-Pacific by 2020.
BCG’s report also includes homes’ offshore wealth, that is their financial assets (property excluded) outside their place of origin, mainly in States or countries with soft fiscal regimes (United Kingdom, Switzerland, Singapore, Panama, etc.). So, private offshore wealth was $10 trillion, up 3% compared to 2014.
In this category, the Africa and Middle East region comes first with $2.6 trillion, ex aequo with Western Europe, but far ahead of Asia-Pacific ($1.6 trillion), South America ($1.2 trillion), Eastern Europe ($700 billion), North America ($700 billion), and Japan ($100 billion).
