US-SOS.INFO

Nations with Extreme Wealth Distributions

(Claude)

  • Gini coefficient = 0 means that everyone has the same amount.
  • Gini coefficient = 1 means that one person has. it all.

The US wealth Gini sits in a distinct tier: very high, but not quite at the extreme top.

The picture, using the UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 Gini coefficients (2024 data):

The United States has a wealth Gini coefficient of 0.74, and among large nations, the closest matches are: Visual Capitalist

  • India — 0.74 (identical to the US)
  • Sweden — 0.75 (slightly higher, somewhat surprising given Sweden’s strong welfare state — this reflects that Swedish wealth concentration, unlike its income distribution, is quite top-heavy)
  • Türkiye — 0.73
  • Mexico — 0.72

A notch above the US, in the most unequal tier, are Brazil (0.82), Russia (0.82), South Africa (0.81), and the United Arab Emirates (0.81), with Saudi Arabia at 0.78 — these are meaningfully higher than the US, not just comparable. Visual Capitalist

A notch below are Singapore (0.70), Germany (0.68), Switzerland (0.67), Israel (0.66), Netherlands (0.65), and China (0.62) — all still quite unequal by wealth, but significantly down from the US.

For context, the more equal large economies are clustered lower: France (0.59), UK (0.58), South Korea (0.57), Italy (0.57), Spain (0.56), Australia (0.55), Japan (0.54).

A couple of things worth flagging:

  1. Wealth Gini ≠ income Gini. The US has middling income inequality by global standards but very high wealth inequality — this is because wealth (assets minus debts) compounds and concentrates much more than income does, and the US has a large share of total assets held by the top 1%.
  2. Sweden’s high wealth Gini despite low income inequality is a known quirk — heavy reliance on debt-financed homeownership and a large financial-asset-holding elite, combined with a high share of the population holding little to no net wealth, pushes its Gini up even though its income distribution is famously flat.

So the answer to “which large nations are comparable to the US” is really just India as a near-exact match, with Sweden, Türkiye, and Mexico close behind — while the countries people often assume are the most unequal (Brazil, Russia, South Africa) are actually somewhat more unequal than the US on this measure, not equivalent to it.

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