A decade ago, the World Bank launched the book Where Is the Wealth of Nations?, which first introduced the concept of wealth as a complementary indicator to gross domestic product (GDP) for monitoring sustainable development in a country. For the first time, we showed that development is about managing a broad portfolio of assets— produced, human, and natural capital. Just as a company measures its value by looking at both its income statement and balance sheet, a look at comprehensive national wealth signals if GDP growth can be sustained over the long run.
There is some good news from the analysis presented in The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018—global wealth grew significantly between 1995 and 2014 and middle-income countries are catching up to high-income countries in terms of their wealth, mainly because of rapid growth in Asia.
More than two dozen low-income countries, where natural capital dominates the composition of wealth, have moved to middle-income status, in part by investing resource rents into infrastructure and education and health, which increases human capital.