In Asia-Pacific nearly all stocks, 96.2%, pay a dividend. What is surprising here is this percentage has actually FALLEN since the middle of 2009 when 98.4% of all stocks in the MSCI Pacific amazingly paid a dividend. MSCI Europe is not far behind at 93.3%.
This is in contrast to the MSCI North America where "only" 77.9% of stocks pay out a dividend to shareholders. Interestingly, the number of stocks that pay a dividend in North America has increased by 5.7% over the past seven years with most of this increase happening over the past three years.
If one looks at how many stocks have increased their dividend every year for the past 10 years than a completely different picture emerges. North American managers seem much more focused on regularly increasing their dividends than their European and Asian peers. 17.2% of all MSCI North American stocks have increased their dividend every year for the past 10 years. In contrast, 8.9% of MSCI Europe stocks have consecutively increased their dividend each year for the past 10 years and only 3.33% of MSCI Pacific stocks have as well.
Finally, the median dividend yield is the highest in Europe at 2.64%. This is over a 1% higher than third place North America (1.42%) and nearly 1% higher than Asia-Pacific (1.73%).