World Balance Sheet, edition 1 (2020): WBS 1.0
To the best of our knowledge, our publication “World Balance Sheet” in 2020 has been the first to produce a financial balance sheet of the world. “World Balance Sheet” has several qualities that other financial statistics or reports do not have. It covers all asset classes on a global level as opposed to other statistics often only covering specific asset classes or countries in their scope. In addition, the values of the asset classes are presented in a consolidated manner, resulting in the natural asset classes of property, plant and equipment, intangible assets, inventories and cash and cash equivalents. These asset classes are derived through the systematic and analytical application of accounting methodologies and reflect all of the world’s factors of production.
The world balance sheet and its figures are determined independently of economic and political systems and the ownership of assets. In our work we deal with core questions of the global economy: What is the value of the world’s capital? How is it composed? Does it support humanity’s standard of living?
Public information is provided here as a free download:
World Balance Sheet, edition 1 (2020) – The figures Download
World Balance Sheet , edition 1 (2020) – Abstract Download
Please find our full work in the Publications section.
World Balance Sheet, edition 2 (planned: 2024/25)
We view our work on the second revised version of the World Balance Sheet as an improvement over the 2020 edition 1, as it reflects new academic research from the last four years. In addition, we can use more comprehensive statistics and data sources. Finally, we are going to improve comparability of figures across data bases by consistently applying IFRS principles and accounting and valuation standards across asset classes.
We continue to develop and present the values of the natural asset classes in a consolidated manner that is independent of economic and political systems as well as of asset ownership.
A downloadable abstract and the associated figures will be available after the publication of World Balance Sheet, Edition 2 (planned: 2024/25).
Please find our full work in the Publications section.