Wealth Comparison Among Turkish States

Wealth is extremely difficult to determine compared to income. While the monetary equivalent of financial assets is clear, it is difficult to determine the volume of non-financial assets. This is because it is difficult to establish a standardized market price for a wide range of non-financial assets, from vehicles to real estate. This has led to a delay in the development of national accounts for individual wealth. This difficulty has also made it difficult to compare individual wealth across countries for many years. Credit Suisse, which recently went bankrupt and was transferred to UBS, started publishing annual wealth reports in 2010. In these reports, wealth per adult, financial wealth, non-financial wealth, debt and median wealth per adult are reported in current dollar prices as country, regional and world averages on an annual basis since 2000. Of course, the data may not be as precise as national income accounts. However, wealth statistics can be regarded as a strong effort to enable global country comparisons in terms of individual wealth since 2000. This study analyzes and discusses the evolution of individual wealth and debt in the six Turkic republics of Turkey, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan between 2000 and 2019. The reason for taking 2019 as the most recent date in the time frame is that it is the last year before the pandemic. Thus, in the long-term comparison of individual wealth, it is possible to prevent the effects of the global crisis that occurred during the pandemic. The findings show that Turkey is the lowest performing country in terms of wealth per adult between 2000 and 2019.