This year will be a “turning point” for the world’s wealth market, which has fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and will see the addition of 500,000 new millionaires each year between now and 2017, according to Datamonitor Financial’s new white paper, The Global Wealth Market 2013.

The paper predicts that the number of global millionaires will hit 9.9 million by 2017, with the US and Asia-Pacific regions expected to surface as the strongest performers. Significant growth is also expected in Latin America, it said. 

Investor confidence has returned, and reduced stock market volatility is expected to re-balance global asset allocation, with deposits and bonds allocation dropping to its lowest value since the onset of the financial crisis, the paper says.

“However, crisis-ridden Europe and forever stagnant Japan are expected to experience minimal growth during the same period with emerging markets continuing to put pressure on their western European counterparts,” says Matia Grossi, senior analyst – private wealth management at Datamonitor Financial.

“One of the main remaining question marks is over Europe, where a dramatic turn of events – such as the collapse of the euro – could send the world economy back to a 2008-like crisis,” Grossi explained. “However, given the slow, step-by-step approach that the European bureaucrats have adopted in recent years to try to solve the crisis, this is unlikely.”

According to the annual RBC Wealth Management/Capgemini World Wealth Report, North America, which in 2011 had lost its top-dog status to Asia-Pacific, is now back as the place with the largest high net worth market. North America has a total population of 3.73 million HNW individuals, compared with 3.68 million in Asia-Pacific. In North America, HNW total assets stood at $12.7 trillion, while in Asia they stood at $12 trillion.

Meanwhile, the global wealth market is currently worth $71 trillion – an impressive $15 trillion more than in 2008, Datamonitor's latest figures show.