Income inequality has increased worldwide, with median wealth declining in most of the markets examined in Swiss bank UBS’s annual Global Wealth Report 2025 issued on Tuesday.
Personal wealth rose at its quickest rate in years during 2025, adding about one million new millionaires in US currency terms, the report said. The Swiss bank surveyed 56 markets, which it says account for more than 92 per cent of the world’s wealth.
Personal wealth climbed by 10.8 per cent in total last year, compared with 4.6 per cent in 2024 and 4.2 per cent in 2023. UBS said the growth was driven by strengthening financial markets.
There were “more millionaires than ever, everywhere,” the research noted, in 2025. The US alone was responsible for over half of this growth, with more than 440,000 persons becoming new millionaires in US dollar terms.
Wealth in Europe, the analysis from UBS found, rose disproportionately fast in dollar terms, largely because of the dollar’s decline versus the euro last year.
But the research also set off alarm bells, stating that while average wealth has gone up, inequality has worsened since 2020. In most nations, median wealth, which gives a clearer idea of the mid-point of the scale, fell, revealing a growing gap between the super-rich and the rest of the population, the bank said.
Asia Pacific growth sluggish
Asia-Pacific area saw slower wealth growth last year than other regions at slightly over 5.9 per cent. The UBS analysis claimed currency effects and market dynamics were behind the modest development but added that the overall long-term outlook in the region is encouraging.
Most of the region’s high-net-worth individuals are in Greater China and Southeast Asia.
Since 2024, the USA has increased its share of global wealth even further. It currently accounts for 35.7 per cent of personal wealth in the UBS sample. Western Europe came next with slightly under 22 per cent. Next is Greater China with 18.5 per cent, aided by its massive population but slightly less than in 2024.
And so, with only the United States and Greater China together, more than half of the world’s personal wealth is concentrated.
But it is also the most unequal country in the world when inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient, the research said, with a Gini score of 0.82. It is followed by Russia with a score of 0.82, South Africa and Brazil with 0.81, Saudi Arabia with 0.78 and the United States with 0.77. Sweden and India also feature in the top 6 with a Gini score of 0.74The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1 that represents the distribution of wealth among a population. The lower the score, the more equal the distribution of wealth, and vice versa.
