Gimme Shelter

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Gimme Shelter

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Bibliographic details

• Authors: Lijun Li, CHRIS WELLISZ
• Published: September 1, 2019

The amount of wealth held offshore

• Estimated total offshore wealth at about 10 percent of world GDP in 2007, or $5.6 trillion.
• About half was kept in Switzerland, the world’s premier offshore banking center since the 1920s.
• The figures for offshore wealth relative to GDP vary dramatically by country, ranging up to 60 percent in Russia, the Gulf states, and Latin America.
• Connections observed between offshore wealth and: the presence of natural resources, a history of political instability, and proximity to Switzerland.

Data sources and evidence

• Swiss central bank publishes country-by-country breakdowns of offshore wealth in the nation’s banks.
• In 2016, the Bank for International Settlements started to release data on the origin of bank deposits held in offshore banking centers like Jersey and Luxembourg, enabling origin-country estimates (for example, how much money residents of Germany held in accounts in Hong Kong SAR).
• A leak of confidential records from the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC in 2007 provided additional evidence on ownership distribution of offshore wealth.

Key findings on distribution and inequality

• Other data suggest the distribution of offshore wealth is heavily skewed toward the rich: about 80 percent belongs to the top 0.1 percent of households.
• Conclusion drawn: accounting for offshore assets substantially boosts the wealth share of the very richest people; in short, inequality may be far greater than other studies have found.

Implications

• Unless hidden riches are accounted for, it is difficult to know how wide disparities in wealth really are.
• Improved country-by-country and origin-of-deposit data make it possible to better estimate who owns offshore wealth and to revise inequality measures accordingly.

Source: Gimme Shelter (F&D Magazine) — Counting wealth in offshore tax havens boosts estimates of inequality

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