Make Christmas Matter

A study on The World Distribution of Household Wealth by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) was released on the 5th of December 2006. For the purposes of the research wealth was defined as:

“We use the term in its long-established sense of net worth: the value of physical and financial assets less debts. In this respect, wealth represents the ownership of capital. Although capital is only one part of personal resources, it is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more broadly on economic development
and growth.”

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The research highlights include:

• The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.
• The richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
• The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which – with 37 million members worldwide – is far from an exclusive club.
• Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe, and high income Asia-Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90% of total world wealth.
• The study finds wealth to be more unequally distributed than income across countries. High income countries tend to have a bigger share of world wealth than of world GDP. The reverse is true of middle- and low-income nations. However, there are exceptions to this rule, for example the Nordic region and transition countries like the Czech Republic and Poland.
• A small number of countries account for most of the wealthiest 10% in the world. One quarter are Americans and another 20% are Japanese. ‘The USA and Japan stand out because they have large populations and high average wealth.’

Another interesting aspect of the research for me was exploration of the “super rich“, the number of US$ based millionaires and billionaires in the world. The research found that the “relationship in the range from $250,000 to $5 million appears stable and remarkably well approximated by a Pareto distribution….. Fitting a Pareto distribution in this range and extrapolating to the highest echelons of the wealth distribution, yielded the following predictions for the number of high wealth holders and the super rich”

Explaining the above table the report states that, Thus extrapolating our upper tail leads us to predict 499 dollar billionaires in the year 2000. The number estimated by Forbes magazine for the year 2000 was 492.

Reflecting on this research, it’s clear that you and I are probably on of the 10% richest people in the world! Compared to the majority of the world’s people, you and I are rich. To gain a graphical representation of how your income compares to others in the world you can do so at this website and see how you stack up. There is a verse in the Bible that says something to the effect that “to whom much is given much is required“. It seems to me that you and I have been given much. The lead me to as the question, “What are we doing with this gift?” Thinking about this question in my own life, I have decided to contribute to a credible charity to help make a difference in a small way in the life of someone less fortunate than me, I would like to encourage you to do the same. Listed below are two organisations that are worth supporting, to help make a difference in the life of someone less fortunate this Christmas.

Make Christmas Matter

The idea behind Make Christmas Matter… is to enable South Africans to support accountable poverty eradication programmes, while reaffirming the real meaning in celebrating Christmas.

Make Christmas Matter enables South Africans to revive the true joy of giving and receiving by making our contribution to a brighter and better future an integral part of celebrating Christmas. The campaign makes it easy for you to make a real difference in uplifting lives, and ensures that the funds do reach accountable, registered non profit and bona fide community-based organisations.

ONE

ONE is a new effort by Americans to rally Americans – ONE by ONE – to fight the emergency of global AIDS and extreme poverty. ONE is students and ministers, punk rockers and NASCAR moms, Americans of all beliefs and every walk of life, united as ONE to help make poverty history. ONE believes that allocating an additional ONE percent of the U.S. budget toward providing basic needs like health, education, clean water and food would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation in the world’s poorest countries. ONE also calls for debt cancellation, trade reform and anti-corruption measures in a comprehensive package to help Africa and the poorest nations beat AIDS and extreme poverty.

So why not time time to get involve and contributing to one of these worthy causes….!

“He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.” – Roy L. Smith

Technorati Tags: Christmas, Leadership, Management, Charity, One, Giving, Community

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Tagged as: Character