At the turn of the twentieth century, the wealthiest one percent of people in the United Kingdom controlled 71 percent of net personal wealth, while the top ten percent controlled 93 percent. The share of wealth controlled by the rich in the United Kingdom fell throughout the twentieth century, and by 1990 the richest one percent controlled 16 percent of wealth, and the richest ten percent just over half of it.

Throughout the interwar period, Nazi leaders and propaganda repeatedly put forward the bogus claim that Jews owned up to 20 percent of all wealth in Germany, despite making up fewer than one percent of the population. At this time, Jews were used as a scapegoat for Germany's economic difficulties after the First World War and during the Great Depression, and the Nazis claimed that the Jews were lining their pockets at the expense of "Aryan" Germans. Unfortunately, there are no official figures for Jewish wealth in the 1930s, and emigration tax data only gives an insight into the finances of wealthier Jews. There are, however, a range of estimates from contemporary and more recent sources, which have been used to estimate the real share of German capital that was owned by Jews. Contemporary estimates At various points in the 1930s, the media, statistical office, and central bank all claimed that the combined wealth of German Jews was somewhere between two and 20 billion Reichsmarks (RM). While these three institutions were all state run under the Nazi regime, and despite their uncertainty, some of these estimates are still treated with consideration due to the credentials of the journalists, economists, and statisticians involved. Additionally, these figures were used with the purpose of identifying just how much money the state could take from the Jewish population, therefore it was of interest for the Nazi authorities to ascertain accurate figures, and not inflate estimates for propaganda purposes. Interestingly, the estimates from the Statistical office actually increased from 1933 to 1936, despite the fact that the state had already been seizing Jewish wealth and restricting Jewish business on a large scale since 1933; this has been attributed to the economic impact of the Great Depression. Modern estimates The estimates from Junz and Ritschl were published in 2002 and 2019 respectively, and used some of the contemporary estimates in their investigation, while taking many additional factors into account. These are now some of the most widely-cited estimates on this subject, with estimates of around 8-16 billion RM in 1933, five billion RM in 1936, and 4.4 billion RM in 1938. In Ritschl's 2019 paper, he then goes on to estimate the share of total German wealth owned by Jews; his results show that the Jewish share of private capital was slightly higher than the average, but was still very much in line with their population size.

In the build up to the Second World War, the United States was the major power with the highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world. In 1938, the United States also had the highest overall GDP in the world, and by a significant margin, however differences in GDP per person were much smaller. Switzerland In terms of countries that played a notable economic role in the war, the neutral country of Switzerland had the highest GDP per capita in the world. A large part of this was due to the strength of Switzerland's financial system. Most major currencies abandoned the gold standard early in the Great Depression, however the Swiss Franc remained tied to it until late 1936. This meant that it was the most stable, freely convertible currency available as the world recovered from the Depression, and other major powers of the time sold large amounts of gold to Swiss banks in order to trade internationally. Switzerland was eventually surrounded on all sides by Axis territories and lived under the constant threat of invasion in the war's early years, however Swiss strategic military planning and economic leverage made an invasion potentially more expensive than it was worth. Switzerland maintained its neutrality throughout the war, trading with both sides, although its financial involvement in the Holocaust remains a point of controversy. Why look at GDP per capita? While overall GDP is a stronger indicator of a state's ability to fund its war effort, GDP per capita is more useful in giving context to a country's economic power in relation to its size and providing an insight into living standards and wealth distribution across societies. For example, Germany and the USSR had fairly similar GDPs in 1938, whereas Germany's per capita GDP was more than double that of the Soviet Union. Germany was much more industrialized and technologically advanced than the USSR, and its citizens generally had a greater quality of life. However these factors did not guarantee victory - the fact that the Soviet Union could better withstand the war of attrition and call upon its larger population to replenish its forces greatly contributed to its eventual victory over Germany in 1945.