The wealth of Britain’s 157 billionaires is now equivalent to more than a fifth of the country’s entire GDP, according to analysis by the Equality Trust – a fivefold increase since 1990.

The charity describes the trend, based on data in this year’s Sunday Times rich list , as Britain’s “ghost GDP”: headline economic growth increasingly disconnected from everyday life.

“Every year politicians point to GDP growth as proof the economy is working. Ghost GDP shows us what that ambition has done to the rest of us because for most of us, it doesn’t feel like the economy is working at all,” said Priya Sahni-Nicholas, the co-executive director of the Equality Trust.

“Ghost GDP and the hollowed out economy it creates, tells you what the rest of us have lost as a direct result.”

Gabriel Zucman, an economist at University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics , said that while in the postwar decades GDP growth numbers were broadly indicative of how income was growing for most of the population,…