Distributional Wealth Accounts - DWA

The ESCB compiles Quarterly Sector Accounts (QSA) statistics for all euro area/EU countries and the euro area as a whole. These show financial transactions and positions, as well as non-financial transactions as compiled by national statistical institutes and Eurostat, for the main institutional sectors, including the household sector. The time series start in the first quarter of 1999 and cover the last reference quarter with a lag of about three to four months. They follow the methodology of the European System of Accounts (ESA 2010).

In parallel, the ESCB also produces the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which provides information on the distribution of wealth among households in all euro area countries. Four waves of the survey have been released, approximating to the years 2010, 2013, 2017 and 2021. These data are published with a lag of around 18 months.

The DWA link these two different datasets, with a view to providing an assessment of the distribution of household wealth that is consistent with the aggregates compiled in the sector accounts. The method and results have been developed and compiled by the ECB and the ESCB’s Expert Group on Distributional Financial Accounts (EG DFA). The method for producing DWA results may be further enhanced over time, e.g. by taking into account additional data sources, and revisions to experimental data may occur.

For more information, please refer to the Overview note, Methodological note and Frequently asked questions, as well as to the Press Briefing presented on 8 January 2024. 

Glossary

• A household’s net wealth is the difference between its total assets (financial and non-financial) and its total liabilities.
• Wealth deciles are computed by ranking the population of a country according to their net wealth, starting with the poorest households, and then grouping them into ten consecutive subsets, each representing 10% of the population: D1 is the poorest decile according to net wealth, D2 the second poorest, etc… up to D10 which is the richest decile according to net wealth. Deciles D1 to D5 together form the “bottom 50%”
• The Gini coefficient measures the extent to which the distribution of wealth within a country deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A coefficient of 0 expresses perfect equality where everyone has the same wealth, while a coefficient of 1 expresses full inequality where only one person has all the wealth.
• The median is the middle value in a group of numbers ranked in order of size. The median is that value of the variate which divides the total frequency into two halves. In other words, it is the number in a range of scores that falls exactly in the middle so that 50% of the scores are above and 50% are below.