
Henley & Partners is a firm that specializes in residence and citizenship by investment. What this means is that if you have a lot of money and you'd like to take take up residency somewhere else, or if you'd like to start a company somewhere else, they can probably help you with that. And, if you're a country, they can also help you design a program to attract the above rich people.
As a result of being in this line of work, the company has a pretty good understanding of where rich people are going. This year, for example, they are forecasting that approximately 128,000 millionaires from around the world will end up moving somewhere else. This doesn't mean that they'll simply get residency in another country; it means they'll start spending greater than 6 months each year there.
It's interesting to look at these provisional flows.
Here are the countries where millionaires are currently leaving:

And here are the countries where they're going:

The United Arab Emirates isn't very big. It has somewhere around 11 million people (2024 estimate). This makes the US about 30x bigger in terms of its population. And yet, they seem to have designed a pretty good mouse trap for catching millionaires. Having no income taxes helps. But the same could be said for a number of the countries on this list: relatively small and jockeying for high-net-worth individuals.
Cover photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

Every year for the last decade, Knight Frank has published something called The Wealth Report. I’ve written about it before, but it’s basically a look at “prime property” and global wealth.
As part of the report, they have something called the PIRI 100. It’s their “Prime International Residential Index”, which looks at luxury residential property prices around the world. They generally define “prime property” as being the top 5% of each market according to value.
This year, the top 25 locations in their PIRI 100 are as follows (for the most part, the data is up to December 2015):

Here in Canada, we like to talk about the insanity of the Vancouver and Toronto real estate markets. This list helps to put that into perspective. Even by global standards, Vancouver is at the top of the pack by quite a significant margin.
It’s worth noting that since this is a “prime property” index, it’s pretty safe to assume that the buyer profiles for these sorts of properties would have a significant international bias. So in a way, this list is really about global capital flows.
Here are the bottom 10 locations on this year’s list:

If you’d like to see the full list, click here.