Countries with the most billionaires

According to the 2013 Forbes Billionaires list, there are 1426 billionaires worldwide, spread across 64 countries. The USA heads the list with 442 billionaires, up from 425 in 2012. Heres the top 10 list for 2013 ranked by the total number of billionaires; see also Huffington Post for a similar ranking for 2011 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/12/10-countries-with-thebillionaires_n_847693.html#s262728&title=8_Switzerland).

Table 1: 2013 Forbes Billionaires List Top 10 Countries by number of billionaires

Country
USA China Russia Germany India Brazil Turkey Hong Kong United Kingdom Canada

Rank (by number of billionaires)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Billionaires, Y
442 122 110 58 55 46 43 39 37 29

Population, x (millions)

315.44 1354.04 143.37 81.95 1210.19 193.95 75.63 7.136 63.18 35.002 Source: The Worlds Billionaires, http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ Now, heres something interesting that you can take away from this table. Leaving China and India aside, the two countries with the highest populations, we see that, in general, as the population x increases, the number of billionaires y also increases. Germany has more billionaires than UK which has more billionaires than Canada, and so on. The x-y graph, see Figure 1 shows a nice linear trend, with the data for UK, Turkey, Germany, and the USA falling on
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the straight line A with the equation y = hx + c = 1.645x 76.78. The slope h and the intercept c can be fixed using any two points (x1 , y1) and (x2, y2) in such a data set. The slope h = (y2 y1) /(x2 x1) Intercept c = y1 hx1 = y2 hx2 ..(1) ..(2)

This is middle school math. Equation 1 follows from the basic definition of the slope of a straight line. Once h is fixed, the unknown intercept c can be determined using equation 2 since the straight line passes through both the points. The US and German data were used, after a careful examination of the trends, since the several countries are aligned along line A.
600

A
500

Billionaires, y

400

y = hx + c = 1.645x 76.78

USA

300
200 100 0 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400

UK

Russia Brazil

Population, x [millions]
Figure 1: Graphical representation of the 2013 Forbes annual billionaire data for eight of the top 10 countries ranked by number of billionaires (China and India re excluded since they distort the scale of the graph.)
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Thus h = (442 58)/(315.44 81.95) = y/x =1.645 where y is the change in the number of billionaires and x the change in the population. Thus, it appears that billionaires are being created at a fixed rate of 1.65 billionaires per million population, or about 165 billionaires per 100 million of population.

Table 2: Per capita rank and number of billionaires

Rank Country Population, x (by per capita ratio) 1 Monaco 0.035 2 St. Kitts & Nevis 0.053 3 Guernsey 0.066 4 Hong Kong 7.1 5 Belize 0.357 6 Cyprus 1.1 7 Israel 7.8 8 Singapore 5.2 9 Kuwait 2.8 10 Switzerland 7.9 Source: Slate Magazine, Emma Roller, March 4, 2013. Billionaires, y 3 1 1 39 1 3 17 10 5 13

Quite surprisingly, exactly the same linear law is also observed when we consider the data for the top 10 countries in the billionaires per capita list which appeared recently in Slate magazine, see Table 2. The countries in this top 10 per capita list are smaller, with populations of less than 10 million. Tiny Monaco, with three (3) billionaires and a population of 35, 427, heads the per capita list. However, as seen in Figure 2, the billionaires per capita, (billionaires per million of population, since x is in million), the ratio y/x decreases as the population x increases. The data can be described by the downward sloping hyperbola with the general equation y/x = A + (B/x). The numerical values of the constants A and B can be determined by preparing a graph of y versus x, since the inverse relation observed for the per capita data implies y = A + Bx. The constants A and B are then determined using classical linear regression analysis.

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Billionaires per capita, y/x [per million]

25

20

15

10

y/x = A + (B/x) = 1.736 + 1.117/x 2 r = 0.951

Hong Kong

0 0.00

2.00

4.00

6.00

8.00

10.00

12.00

Population, x [millions]
Figure 2: Graphical representation of the billionaires per capita data for nine of ten countries with populations of less than ten million. (Monaco data was excluded in preparing this graph since it distorts the scale and masks the inverse hyperbolic relationship seen here.) Source of data: Slate magazine, Emma Roller.

The x-y graph is also illustrated in Figure 3. Only the data for nine of ten countries is included in Figure 3. Hong Kong, with 39 billionaires, and a population comparable to Israel, was excluded from the regression analysis since it is clearly an outlier in this graph, and also lie clearly above the hyperbola in Figure 2. It is indeed remarkable that the numerical values of the slope h = 1.736, for the smaller populations, is virtually identical to slope h = 1.646 deduced from the data for some of the worlds largest countries. In other words, the rate of creation of billionaires in the population seems to be a constant, across countries. These results have been discussed in detail in two recently published articles uploaded at www.scribd.com, see Refs. [3] and [4].
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20

Israel
16

Billionaires, y

y = hx + c = 1.736x + 1.117 2 r = 0.951 Switzerland Singapore

12

Monaco Kuwait Cyprus

0 0.0 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 10.0

Population, x [millions]
Figure 3: Graphical representation of the 2013 Forbes annual billionaire data for nine of ten countries with populations of less than ten million which also make the top 10 list for billionaires per capita (Slate magazine, Emma Roller).

Reference List
1. Which Country Has the Most Billionaires Per Capita? By Emma Roller, March 4, 2013, Slate magazine, click here, or see http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/03/04/forbes_billionaires_l ist_countries_with_the_most_billionaires_per_capita.html 2. 10 Countries with the most billionaires, by Harry Bradford, The Huffington Post, First posted April 12, 2011, updated June 12, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/12/10-countries-with-thebillionaires_n_847693.html#s262776&title=4_India

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3. Billionaires and Calculus: Ratio versus Rate of Change Is Einsteins Work Function Observed In this Problem? Published March 5, 2013. http://www.scribd.com/doc/128610494/The-Forbes-Billionaires-andCalculus-Is-Einstein-s-Work-Function-Observed-Here 4. The Rate of Creation of Billionaires: Analysis of the Forbes 2013 Billionaire List, Published March 6, 2013, http://www.scribd.com/doc/128944910/The-Rate-of-Creation-ofBillionaires-Analysis-of-the-2013-Forbes-Billionaire-s-List 5. Billionaires and the Population Law: Analysis of the 2013 Forbes Billionaires List, to be published shortly. 6. Legendre, On Least Squares, English Translation of the original paper in French, http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/legendre.pdf 7. Line of Best-Fit, Least Squares Method, see worked example given here http://hotmath.com/hotmath_help/topics/line-of-best-fit.html The formula for h used in this example is an actually approximate one and was used, before the advent of modern computers, since it only involves the determination of x2 and xy and the sum of all the values of x, y, x2 and xy. The exact formula, is given below, with xm and ym denoting the mean or average values of x and y in the data set, and ym = hxm + c since the bestfit line always passes through the point (xm , ym). h = (x xm)(y ym)/ (x xm)2 Determine the deviations of the individual x and y values from the mean, or average, (x xm) and (y ym). Determine the product (x xm)(y ym) and their sum. This gives the numerator in the expression for h. Determine the square (x xm)2 and the sum. This gives the denominator in the expression for h. This also fixes the intercept c via ym = hxm = c . Then, using the regression equation, determine the predicted value yb on the best-fit line and the vertical deviation (y yb) and the squares (y- yb)2. The sum of these squares is minimum. This can be checked by assigning other values for h (using any two points) and allowing the graph to pivot around (xm, ym). The regression coefficient r2 = 1 - { (y- yb)2 / (y- ym)2 } is a measure of the strength of the correlation between x and y (or y/x versus x). For a perfect correlation, when all points lie exactly on the graph, r2 =+1.000.
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About the author V. Laxmanan, Sc. D.

The author obtained his Bachelors degree (B. E.) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Poona and his Masters degree (M. E.), also in Mechanical Engineering, from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, followed by a Masters (S. M.) and Doctoral (Sc. D.) degrees in Materials Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. He then spent his entire professional career at leading US research institutions (MIT, Allied Chemical Corporate R & D, now part of Honeywell, NASA, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), and General Motors Research and Development Center in Warren, MI). He holds four patents in materials processing, has co-authored two books and published several scientific papers in leading peer-reviewed international journals. His expertise includes developing simple mathematical models to explain the behavior of complex systems. While at NASA and CWRU, he was responsible for developing material processing experiments to be performed aboard the space shuttle and developed a simple mathematical model to explain the growth Christmas-tree, or snowflake, like structures (called dendrites) widely observed in many types of liquid-to-solid phase transformations (e.g., freezing of all commercial metals and alloys, freezing of water, and, yes, production of snowflakes!). This led to a simple model to explain the growth of dendritic structures in both the ground-based experiments and in the space shuttle experiments. More recently, he has been interested in the analysis of the large volumes of data from financial and economic systems and has developed what may be called the Quantum Business Model (QBM). This extends (to financial and economic systems) the mathematical arguments used by Max Planck to develop quantum physics using the analogy Energy = Money, i.e., energy in physics is like money in economics. Einstein applied Plancks ideas to describe the photoelectric effect (by treating light as being composed of particles called photons, each with the fixed quantum of energy conceived by Planck). The mathematical law deduced by
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Planck, referred to here as the generalized power-exponential law, might actually have many applications far beyond blackbody radiation studies where it was first conceived. Einsteins photoelectric law is a simple linear law and was deduced from Plancks non-linear law for describing blackbody radiation. It appears that financial and economic systems can be modeled using a similar approach. Finance, business, economics and management sciences now essentially seem to operate like astronomy and physics before the advent of Kepler and Newton. Finally, during my professional career, I also twice had the opportunity and great honor to make presentations to two Nobel laureates: first at NASA to Prof. Robert Schrieffer (1972 Physics Nobel Prize), who was the Chairman of the Schrieffer Committee appointed to review NASAs space flight experiments (following the loss of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986) and second at GM Research Labs to Prof. Robert Solow (1987 Nobel Prize in economics), who was Chairman of Corporate Research Review Committee, appointed by GM corporate management.

Cover page of AirTran 2000 Annual Report

Can you see that plane flying above the tall tree tops that make a nearly perfect circle? It requires a great deal of imagination to see and photograph it.

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