Improving wealth accounting and global sustainability assessment: assessing wealth benchmark estimates

The current paper first clarifies commonalities and disparities between a 2018 report by the World Bank Group (WBG), the Inclusive Wealth Report (IWR), and Arrow et al.’s 2012 paper. It is worth comparing the measures of wealth components and reported values of the two reports and Arrow et al. 2012, since the WBG 2018 report foregoes using the present value of future consumption and employs different measures of human capital wealth than the IWR 2018 report, and as a result, the two authorities reported different country-level wealth. We clarified what methodologies, parameters, equations, and datasets were used in the reports, and on this basis determined a respective calculation method for each wealth component, or chose one of the multiple possible measures devised by us on the basis of the reports and public databases for the years 2000, 2010, 2014, and 2020. We determined and chose methods on the basis of higher coefficients of determination, or their agreement with reported values, the inclusion of related variables, and their simplicity. The chosen methods were calibrated by comparing their measured values with the values in the reports. The significant differences between the two reports can be duplicated by our assigned or chosen methods. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025.