The Geography of the World's Billionaires

Over the past couple of decades, the growth of the world’s super-rich has brought about levels of global inequality not seen since the Gilded Age. Understanding where these super-rich individuals and families actually live can help us learn about their sources of wealth and how their mobility affects cities in a global economy. Cities such as New York, London, and Paris have seen huge inflows of the super-rich, a fact which many believe has contributed to skyrocketing housing prices and burgeoning inequality in these cities.

A new report that I co-authored with my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander sets out to map this global geography of the super-rich. To do so, we used detailed data from Forbes on the more than 1,800 billionaires across the globe, whose combined wealth exceeded $7 trillion in 2015.

All told, the U.S. is home to almost a third of the world’s billionaires, with another 12.2 percent from China, 4.5 percent each from India and Russia, and 4.3 percent from Germany. The map above and table below chart the numbers of billionaires across the world’s cities.