The President of Kazakhstan said that 162 people in the country concentrated most of the national assets. Where did this indicator come from and how great is the stratification in Kazakhstan in comparison with other countries, RBC understood
Photo: Bolatbek Otarbayev / AP
Kazakh President Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev on Friday, January 21, said that the income gap between the rich and the poor in the republic had reached an unacceptable level, playing the role of a “lighted match and a powder keg” for the January protests and riots. “International experts claim that only 162 people own half the fortune [страны]’, Tokayev said.
“162 people” is a conditional indicator. It is adapted from the 2019 KPMG Kazakhstan and Central Asia Survey (.pdf), which used data from the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s World Wealth Report 2018 as a baseline. Based on Credit Suisse data, Kazakhstani KPMG then estimated that 0.001% of the country’s adult population, or 162 individuals, own a fortune of $50 million or more (each), or about 55% of the total national wealth. We are talking about inequality between the rich and the poor in the distribution of assets, not income. Credit Suisse told RBC that at the moment they do not have up-to-date data on the number of Kazakhstanis with a fortune above $50 million and the share of national wealth that they own.
In terms of the share of citizens with assets more than $50 million in the adult population of the country (0.001%, according to KPMG), Kazakhstan does not show high rates. For example, in Russia at the end of 2020, there were 2967 such super-rich individuals, or 0.0027% of the adult population: a share more than twice as high as in Kazakhstan. The proportion of citizens with a fortune of more than $50 million in the adult population of the United States is even higher – 0.044%, follows from Credit Suisse data for 2020. The relative performance of Kazakhstan (assuming that it has not changed much compared to 2018) is comparable to Brazil and India. But, unlike these countries, the adult population of Kazakhstan is not numerous – 12.2 million people.
According to the World Inequality Laboratory, which uses a different approach, estimating how much national wealth falls on 1% of the country’s population, Kazakhstan is in the middle of the list of countries in this parameter, losing not only to Russia and the United States, but also, for example, Germany and Switzerland. .
