Percent of World Market Cap by Country

Recently we highlighted that the United States' market cap as a percentage of global market cap has been on the decline.  Below we provide a table of the numbers for 29 other countries.  As shown, US stocks still dominate world market cap by a wide margin at 29.9%.  Japan has the second largest stock market representation at 8.2%, followed by the UK (6.8%), China (5.4%) and France (4.4%).  China is noteworthy because it made up just 1.7% of global market cap at the start of 2004, and now it has the fourth largest representation. 

We also sorted the list of countries by how much their % of world market cap has changed since the start of 2004.  As shown, Saudi Arabia has increased the most at 877.5% -- going from 0.1% to 0.9%.  Saudi Arabia is followed by Egypt, Qatar, Brazil, UAE, China, Russia and India.  With oil's enormous rise over the last few years, it's no surprise that many of the countries with the biggest gains are major oil producing countries.  The US is at the very bottom of the list with a significant decline of 31.6%.  Japan is down 20%, the UK is down 12%, Italy is down 10%, and France is down 5%.

Comments

[David Roskoph:]

Thank you for this anaylsis!

2008 Jun 12 10:52 AM

[wright:]

I think this chart can be misleading. I expect the dominant factor driving this change has been the adoption of capitalism in those countries and assets entering the equity market, rather than non-US equities dramatically outperforming US equities.

2008 Nov 21 05:52 PM