Nearly 3% of Kiwis are one-percenters – Oxfam

More than 100,000 New Zealanders got a significant status upgrade earlier this week.

Ahead of the annual gathering of the globe’s most influential political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, anti-poverty charity Oxfam issued a release on rising inequality that claimed the share of the world's wealth hoarded by the richest 1% increased from 44% in 2009 to 48% last year.

More starkly, Oxfam claimed the 80 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 50%  (3.5 billion people).

On current trends, the report said, the 1% will control over half of the world’s wealth by 2016.

Oxfam's executive director Winnie Byanyim called the scale of global inequality “simply staggering” and said "business as usual for the elite isn't a cost-free option – failure to tackle inequality will set the fight against poverty back decades.”

(Interestingly, Ms Byanyim is co-chairing the Davos event, though whether that means she’s a paid-up member of said elite or the gathering’s token commoner is not clear.)

But before you succumb to the politics of envy, there’s a silver lining of sorts in the report: you could well be part of this economic elect.

It turns out the price admission to this group – the conceptual existence of which was popularised by one of the more coherent catch-cries of the Occupy Wall Street movement of late 2011 and which was hitherto assumed to lead a cloistered, rarefied life far from the hoi polloi – isn’t as high as one may have thought.

Oxfam based its release on data from the annual Credit Suisse Global Wealth datebook, which calculates the distribution of global wealth going back to 2000 by using the value of an individual's financial and non-financial assets, mainly property and land, minus their debts, to determine what individuals “own”. (Wages or income are excluded.)

Based on that, $NZ970,000 in assets once debts have been subtracted is all that’s required to arguably belong to the asset-rich A-list.

That means 123,000 New Zealanders – or, paradoxically, almost 3% of the population – qualify as a one-percenter.

As such, if you’re not one of them, you’ll certainly know a few, so it’s probably a good time to either crack open the champers to celebrate or hit up some acquaintances for a loan to fuel your aspirational lifestyle.

Or perhaps not.

Inevitably, however, Oxfam has copped criticism for the way it has stacked the numbers by only using figures since 2010, when the proportion of wealth held by the wealthiest 1% had risen, and not from 2000, when it had fallen every year until 2009.

And because Credit Suisse measures net wealth, a Kiwi on a high salary who owes more on their mortgage than they have in assets counts as less wealthy, for example, than a debt-free subsistence farmer.

NBR ONLINE understands the criteria for inclusion on the NBR Rich List (a minimum net worth of $50 million) will not be changed in light of Oxfam's number crunching.