The New Wealth in Israel - Sagit Azari Wiesel

Since 1995, a group of researchers from the World Bank have been publishing a report every few years on the topic of 'The Wealth of Nations' — its size, characteristics, and significance. The report highlights the importance of measuring wealth as a complementary indicator to GDP, in assessing the stability and economic strength of countries. Wealth is measured through physical capital, natural resource capital, and intangible capital, which is mostly human capital. The findings of the World Bank show that economic development is closely aligned with national wealth. The inequality between rich and poor countries in human capital is very high, almost 100 times per person, and although wealth has grown in all countries, wealth per capita has not increased in poor countries. Since the World Bank's analyses are primarily comparative between developed and developing countries and refer to the distribution of wealth in general, this chapter will focus on the Israeli case and will analyze in depth the distribution of wealth in Israel into its various components, as well as according to additional demographic divisions.