Belgium is the world’s 4th richest country by *median* wealth per adult, 3rd lowest inequality worldwide (source: Credit Suisse)

30 comments

  1. This ranking does not include dwarf states like Liechtenstein, because reliable information about those is too hard to get by according to Credit Suisse. The conclusion of this and many other stats is that Belgium is an unsexy country to the outside world, but a place with great potential for a good life 🙂

  5. This is really an astonishing and overlooked fact. High wealth and low inequality are an unusual combination and a huge achievement, especially for a place with umpteen governments that barely seem to function most times.

  9. This won’t stop people from claiming that our tax rate makes it impossible to build wealth in Belgium and that the middle class is getting screwed

  10. Most proud of the inequality number. This proves you can both be rich without marginalising a large part of the population. Wealth grows faster if an entire nation has something to gain.

    Look at the top 4, all doing good with inequality.

  11. Would be interesting to see this adjusted by age, since a lot of that wealth is due to the appreciation of real estate owned by middle aged or older people.

  12. We often like to complain about what we don’t have whilst forgetting all the things we *do* have. I always make fun of how broken our country is to my north american colleagues but at the end of the day, I definitely don’t want to leave.

  13. Maybe we’re on to something with that automatic wage indexation stuff. Especially since Luxemburg is first on that list as well.

  14. A big part of that is boomers sitting on real estate that has gone absolutely nuts in value. For millennials, the situation looks a lot more grim than those numbers would lead you to believe.

  15. I think two main factor about the feeling people have is one : that it’s almost impossible to go rich apart from sheer luck : it’s almost implied in the low inequality, which also induce that if it’s hard to going really rich, it’s also hard to going really poor.

    And second, that people have a really hard time to align their wish to their earning, a lot of people i meet want to have a nice car, new house, last smartphone, big city life and so on. You can’t have everything, you have to make choice and work for it and you can have it. And that’s awesome.

    (IE. I’ve bought my house alone, short before 30, without any help from a relative with and with less than 2k revenue/month : Sure it’s not in the outskirt of Bruxelle, i had to work a lot in my house to make it nice, and i’ve got to make saving during few year; but i have my house nonetheless)

  21. To be fair: I think we do have a prosperous life in Belgium, BUT it is close to impossible to become VERY wealthy in Belgium. I would expect to see a heavy concentration of people around those median and average numbers. There are indeed 5.7% millionaires in Belgium vs 14.9% in Switzerland or 22.7% in Luxembourg.

  22. Much can be said about this in terms of nuance…

    I’m just gonna say: OVLD, N-VA and VB want to get rid of this.(and equivalents on walloon side)

  23. I will probably get downvoted to oblivion, but Belgium is definitely one of the greatest country on earth and probably the best country in Europe. Belgium is a really weird country (in a very good way) but it somehow fucking works! It has great architecture (im aware of that Tumblr page but I still somehow dig the “uniqueness” of those “ugly” buildings), cities, food, great business opportunities, and is home to one of the best universities on earth.

    Some of yall are extremely ungrateful folks, imma give you that.

  24. My mom and dad bought a house for 2016990.07BEF/50000€ back in the 90s the house now worth probably more than 350K €. Same thing probably happened to the people who bought a house before the Euro

  25. I guess this includes house ownership and that makes it difficult to adjust. If I sell my house here I might have 300k, but I would be homeless. And that value is mostly because of location. I know a lot of people in Romania own houses, some really nice houses, but the value is less, so how does that adjust in these charts.

  28. I have lived years in 20+ countries around the world, some rich, many poor. It always blows my mind how my fellow Belgians can complain so much about Belgium. We are absolutely crushing it!

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