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Corporations own no wealth
Companies and their owners
Corporations occupy buildings and run machinery, but those real assets are matched by liabilities on their balance sheets: the debt they owe and the equity they issue. Shareholders own corporations, and those shareholders are primarily households.
Household net worth
Heading into 2025, households had a net worth of $539 trillion, up nearly $400 trillion from 25 years earlier. They hold it in two roughly equal ways: directly, through real assets that are mostly homes, and indirectly, through stocks, bonds, and deposits that give them a claim on the wealth the rest of the economy produces.
Government balance sheets
Governments hold the remainder, mostly public property, infrastructure, public land, and natural resources, and their balance sheets differ widely. The US and UK governments have significant negative net worth because their public debt is high compared with their public assets. China's government has a net worth nearly equal to that of its households, because it owns large amounts of land and massive equity in state-owned enterprises.
Why do government balance sheets look so different?
Standard government accounts list debts and physical assets but leave out the state's largest resource, its power to collect future taxes. That is why a government with deep public debt can show negative net worth while its economy keeps producing large incomes. The IMF publishes public sector balance sheets for many countries and notes that the coverage of assets varies widely from one country to another.
How does China's state own so much land?
Under China's constitution, urban land belongs to the state and rural land belongs to collectives, so private individuals cannot own it outright. Instead, local governments grant land-use rights for fixed terms, which run up to 70 years for residential housing. Local governments have sold these rights to developers for decades, and the revenue has been a major source of their income. The land stays on the state's books as an asset.
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