India's rich, richer than the French. Its poor, much poorer
As India's politicians struggle to manage an outcry over the definition of poverty -- does earning more than $0.65 a day really mean you are not poor? -- a new report shows the country's rich doing very nicely from fast economic growth.
Rubbing shoulders with Singapore and Hong Kong, India appears in the top five countries where the affluent now have more than $1 million investable assets on average, according to the Global Affluent Investor study conducted by research company TNS.
“India and China have already surpassed major European markets like Germany and France. It's interesting to see that the entrepreneurial spirit of people in these markets is already paying off in terms of personal wealth,” Reg van Steen, Director of Business and Finance, TNS, said.
But the report points to an important difference between the emerging Asian powers and their Western peers -- wealth distribution.
“While 27 percent of the US are affluent this falls to around 1 percent in India and China,” the report said. It defined households with more than $100,000 of investable assets as affluent.
It will take some time for the number of rich in India and China to catch up with the U.S. where the report found 31 million affluent households, 10 times as many as India and China each have.
“It is necessary perhaps to think in a different way, and to see that a country like India, like Schrödinger's cat, exists in at least two forms simultaneously: rich and poor,” wrote British historian Patrick French.
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