Why has the number of millionaires increased in France and decreased worldwide?

Are you getting richer and richer in France? There are nearly three million millionaires in the hexagon, according to UBS’s annual Global Wealth Report released Tuesday. A figure that puts our country in third place among the “suppliers” of millionaires after the United States and China.

And while the number of the world’s rich continues to decline in most of our neighbors, in France it increased between 2021 and 2022. In 2022, there were almost 25,000 more millionaires in our country than in the previous year.

This trend did not fail to react, in particular, among the left political leaders. “French millionaires can say thank you to Macron’s tax gifts,” Manon Aubry, leader of La France Insoumise in the European Parliament, responded to X (ex-Twitter). “This is the Americanization of France, imposed by the forced march of Emmanuel Macron,” said environmental MP Sandrine Rousseau for her part.

But is the situation in France really that special? First, “the real wealth of all households has increased by 150% since 2000,” the authors of the report recall, which necessarily leads to an increase in the number of millionaires. “Between 2020 and 2021, heritage fund growth in France increased by 8%,” said Luc Arrondel, economist and author of the book. Real Estate: European Diversity. Considering that the average wealth of the population is growing, it is not surprising that there are more millionaires.”

Then, if the number of millionaires did increase slightly in 2022 compared to 2021, it would be more accurate to say that the number of rich French people has remained relatively stable. There were 2,822 million in 2020, 2,796 million in 2021 and 2,821 million in 2022.

“In France, the majority of these millionaires have invested in or come from the luxury sector, which has performed very well in terms of sales and shares in recent years,” explains Christopher Dembik, economist and head of economic research at SaxoBank Group. And this good health will be confirmed in the coming years. »

Rather decrease in other countries

Conversely, the number of millionaires in the US, Japan, Germany and the UK continues to decline, which explains France’s advance in the rankings. “To find out why their number has declined in other countries, you need to look at three data points: the evolution of the real estate market, the evolution of stock market prices, and the evolution of the savings rate,” notes Luc Arrondel.

It should also be remembered that, despite the large number of millionaires on its land (2.8 million), France remains very far behind the United States (22.7 million, providing 38% of the world’s millionaires) and China (6.2-11 %) and remains close to the standards of equivalent economies such as Germany (2.6-4%) or the UK (2.5-4%).

And in another ranking of the super-rich (having a fortune of more than $ 100 million), France ranks only ninth with 3,890 people, behind the United States (123,870), China (32,910) and our Germany (9,100 people). ) and British (3980) neighbors, according to the UBS report.

Finally, this increase in the number of millionaires is not necessarily synonymous with an increase in inequality. “If we read the entire report, we will see that our Gini index (which measures inequality across countries) has remained stable for twenty years, and the share of wealth held by the top 1% has declined in France. In Germany, for example, there is much more inequality than in our country,” emphasizes Luc Arrondel and concludes: “These are just statistics, everyone interprets it in their own way. »