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A new report from Wealth-X found that, even during a pandemic, the very high net worth (VHNW) population grew.
Wealth-X defines the VHNW as those with a net worth between $5 million and $30 million. The report, called Very High Net Worth Handbook 2021, looks at where they are, who they are, and how big their ranks have grown.
In 2020, their global population increased "slightly," by 1.3%, to around 2.7 million people. In 2019, by contrast, the population saw 10% growth.
"This was a sharp slowdown from double-digit growth a year earlier, and masked large regional differences, but was a resilient performance set against the backdrop of a global pandemic, national lockdowns, international travel bans, trade disruption and the deepest contraction in world economic output for a generation," the report said.
Their total wealth also saw a similar increase, increasing by 1.2% to a total of $26.8 trillion.
Meanwhile, their global billionaire peers tacked on an additional $4 trillion to their wealth during the pandemic. That was a 54% increase for the world's 2,365 billionaires, bringing their cumulative wealth to $12.39 trillion — a little under half of the VHNW's cumulative wealthy.
But the VHNW class may be in for more growth than their smaller showing in 2020. The Wealth-X report anticipates that they'll add around 1.2 million members, for a total population of 3.8 million. Wealth-X also predicts that their wealth will increase by $11.4 trillion to $38.2 trillion.
Those in the global middle class did not fare as well. A recent report from the Pew Research Center — which classifies the middle class as those who earn about $14,600 to $29,200 a year (or live on $10 to $20 a day) — found that 54 million fell out of the global middle class.
While the number of VHNW individuals grew, so did another group: A January report from Oxfam estimated between 200 million to 500 million people may have fallen into poverty during 2020.
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