Precious facts about the rich

'Let me tell you about the rich. They are different from you and me.' This famous quote, taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story The Rich Boy, is just as famous as the putdown credited to the literary critic Mary Colum who said: 'The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.'

Since those heady days of America in the 1920s and '30s, the fascination with the rich has hardly wavered; all that has changed is a growing volume of studies about the rich. One of the latest, the Julius Baer Wealth Report Asia, produced in co-operation with CLSA, is packed full of little gems.

First up, for those obsessed by Hong Kong's position in international comparison tables, the Special Administrative Region is, yet again, pipped at the post by Singapore as having the wealthiest people in Asia (excluding Japan in this survey). In US dollar terms, the median level of wealth (meaning investible assets, besides property for one's own use) in Hong Kong is US$152,000, compared with a modest US$9,000 in India, US$11,000 on the mainland, and US$35,000 in Taiwan.

But fear not, in Gini coefficient terms, which measures wealth disparity, Hong Kong is still there right at the top of the league.

This survey defines high net worth individuals (HNWI) as those with over US$1 million to invest. Impressively, tiny Hong Kong accounts for 7 per cent of the HNWI wealth in Asia, above even tinier Singapore, which accounts for 6 per cent but understandably well below China, the world's most populous nation, which accounts for 43 per cent. China's share of Asian wealth is projected to rise to 49 per cent by 2015, while Hong Kong's share of the action is estimated to slip back to 5 per cent at this time.

The Baer report says there are 86,000 millionaires and 484 billionaires in Hong Kong. To put these figures in perspective, it means that the SAR, with a population of about six million adults, has about half the number of HNWIs found in India, with an adult population of about 730 million.