McKinsey Global Institute (2021): The Rise and Rise of the Global Balance Sheet

Overview

"The Rise and Rise of the Global Balance Sheet: How Productively Are We Using Our Wealth?" (McKinsey Global Institute, November 2021) built national balance sheets — assets, liabilities, and net worth — for ten countries representing over 60% of global income (Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, the UK, and the US), then extrapolated to a global estimate.[1] It found that global net worth roughly tripled between 2000 and 2020 (from about $160 trillion to $510 trillion), a rise driven overwhelmingly by asset-price appreciation — chiefly real estate — rather than by growth in productive capital, and that real estate accounts for roughly two-thirds of global net worth.[1][2]

The report is not a Georgist study and does not analyze land value separately from structures; its headline "real estate" figure bundles land with buildings. Lars Doucet's Land Is a Big Deal draws a more specific number from the same underlying MGI data set — land alone at roughly 39% of global real assets — as one data point in its broader case that land value, not reproducible capital, dominates modern wealth and the modern rise in the capital share.[3] Because the McKinsey report itself does not isolate land from structures in its published headline figures, the land-specific 39% figure should be treated as Doucet's own extraction/estimate from MGI's underlying data rather than an MGI headline claim; a reader wanting to verify it directly should consult the full MGI report and its data appendix. The full report was fetched and read this pass (via the Internet Archive copy of the MGI PDF). It confirms the headline numbers used here verbatim — net worth grew "from $160 trillion in 2000 to $510 trillion in 2020" and "Real estate makes up two-thirds of global real assets or net worth" (shown as 68% in Exhibit E6), with "residential real estate including land [amounting] to almost half of global net worth" and "corporate and government buildings and the land associated with them accounting for an additional 20 percent." Crucially, the report bundles land into "real estate" and publishes no standalone global land-only headline percentage; the closest breakout is Exhibit E6 (repeated as Exhibit 11), "Distribution of real assets, global average, 2020," which does carve out a discrete "Land" slice within the real-estate total. Note also that the report's own prominent "39 percent" figure is unrelated to land — it is the share of non-real-estate assets (infrastructure, machinery, equipment, intangibles) in Japan, the country where such assets peak ("from just 15 percent of net worth in France and the United Kingdom to 39 percent in Japan"). The ~39%-of-real-assets land figure therefore remains Doucet's own extraction, corroborated by the presence of the Exhibit E6 land breakout but not stated as an MGI headline.

See Also

• Land Is a Big Deal (book) — the discovery source citing this report's data
• Most of the modern rise in the capital share is land, not capital — the wiki's broader outcome page this report's finding supports
• Rognlie (2015): Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share — the academic decomposition reaching a parallel conclusion via national accounts rather than balance-sheet reconstruction
• Larson (2019): US Land Value — a complementary US-specific land value estimate

Sources

1. McKinsey Global Institute, "The Rise and Rise of the Global Balance Sheet: How Productively Are We Using Our Wealth?" (November 2021), authored by Jan Mischke, Anu Madgavkar, Jonathan Woetzel, Eckart Windhagen, Sven Smit, and others. mckinsey.com · full report PDF — used for the ten-country scope, the $160T→$510T net worth figures, and the ~two-thirds-of-net-worth-in-real-estate finding.
2. "McKinsey: Two-thirds of global wealth stored in real estate," TheCable, November 2021 — used for independent secondary confirmation of the two-thirds real estate figure. thecable.ng
3. Lars Doucet, Land Is a Big Deal (2022), Ch. 17 (see also the wiki's data table at Ch. 14–17 summary) — used for the discovery context: the ~39%-of-global-real-assets land figure cited from the McKinsey (2021) data set. Book page