Taiwan’s average wealth per household was NT$16.38 million (US$503,102) at the end of 2021, with about 71 percent of households coming in below the average, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
Median wealth per household was NT$8.94 million, said the agency, which released the data for the first time in 30 years.
The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households — a measure of inequality where zero indicates complete equality of wealth and one indicates complete inequality — was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.
Photo: Clare Cheng, Taipei Times
The average wealth among the top 20 percent of Taiwanese households was NT$51.33 million in 2021, accounting for 62.68 percent of total household wealth, while the average for the bottom 20 percent was NT$770,000, or 0.94 percent of the total, the data showed.
As a result, the average household wealth for the top 20 percent was 66.9 times higher than for the bottom 20 percent, lower than Australia’s 93.1 times, the UK’s 109.5, South Korea’s 140.1 and France’s 627.4, meaning that household wealth distribution is relatively even in Taiwan, the DGBAS said.
The last time the DGBAS released a wealth distribution report was in 1992. The agency has not released a similar report since then because data was difficult to come by due to the need for personal information, it said.
Unlike the previous report, which was based on a survey of households the previous year, the latest report was compiled using surveys of family income and expenditure, along with other household data such as assets and liabilities, the agency said, urging caution when making comparisons as the two reports used different data collection and statistical methods.
In the previous report, the average household wealth was NT$5.26 million in 1991, with the top 20 percent’s wealth 16.8 times higher than that of the bottom 20 percent, while the Gini coefficient was 0.47 at that time, DGBAS data showed.
The widening gap in wealth disparity is inevitable in free economies, but Taiwan's wealth inequality is less severe than in many other countries, DGBAS Census Department Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) said at a news conference yesterday.
The agency yesterday also reported that Taiwan’s gross national wealth was NT$310.61 trillion at the end of 2022, an increase of NT$26.18 trillion, or 9.2 percent, from the end of 2021, while net national wealth was NT$247.14 trillion, also an increase of NT$21.72 trillion, or 9.63 percent, from a year earlier.
National wealth statistics represent the current value of all goods owned by the people in a nation at the end of year, the agency said.
Gross national wealth is the total value of net assets on current prices owned by five sectors: households, non-profit institutions, non-financial enterprises, financial enterprises and government, and net national wealth represents the assets value of gross national wealth with depreciation being deducted, it said.
At the end of 2022, the net worth — assets minus liabilities — of the household sector was NT$159.08 trillion, accounting for 64.37 percent of the net worth of all sectors, the report showed.
Additional reporting by CNA
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