How Dividend Decisions Are Different Depending On The Region You Invest In

While the world has certainly become flatter and globalization isn't going anywhere, different regionally stock market characteristics still do exist. One such example is what management decides to do about dividends. In Asia, it seems that management is much more focused on paying a dividend while in North America management is more focused on increasing their dividend. European managers are happy to fall  in between the peers when it comes to dividends while paying the highest median dividend yield to boot.

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%).