Aliko

In the U.S. it means making at least $343,000 in adjusted gross income as reported on your tax return. But what if we applied the 1/99 ratio to wealth, not income, and instead of comparing yourself to other people you picked a bigger target, like an entire country?

If you were worth 1% of Nigeria's gross domestic product, you’d be worth $5.6 billion. That’s silliness. Aliko Dangote alone fall way short of that.

   

But these kinds of 1% people do exist, just not in Nigeria, China or Western Europe, where the economies are too big for such concentration of wealth. Among the World’s Billionaires, we found nine people worth more than one percent of their nation’s economy. Whether it is healthy for an economy to have one person sitting on top of so much wealth is an excellent subject for another post. Comments?

One man, Bidzina Ivanishvili of Georgia, is worth 24% of his nation’s GNP (using the purchasing power parity method of calculating economic output). If I used the other GNP method that uses the official exchange rate, as we did in the cover story on Ivanishvili, he’d be worth half of Georgia’s GNP. Also, for dramatic effect, I combined the Hariris and Mikatis of Lebanon into one chunk. We count the siblings separately on the 2012 World’s Billionaires list.

Name	Country	Net Worth ($mil)	GDP ($mil, PPP)	% Of GDP
Bidzina Ivanishvili	Georgia	6,400	24,200	26.0%
Mikati family	Lebanon	6,000	61,600	10.0%
Hariri family	Lebanon	6,800	61,000	10.0%
Rinat Akhmetov	Ukraine	16,000	327,000	5.0%
Aliko Dangote	Nigeria	11,200	414,000	2.7%
Henry Sy	Philippines	8,000	393,000	2.0%
Miloud Chaabi	Morocco	2,900	163,000	1.7%
Americo Amorim	Portugal	4,400	247,000	1.7%
Vladimir Kim	Kazakhstan	3,500	214,000	1.6%
Dinu Patriciu	Romania	1,500	263,000	0.5%