Inequality and wealth distribution among Irish households: introducing new Distributional Wealth Accounts

This Article introduces the experimental Distributional Wealth Accounts (DWA) for Ireland - a novel high-frequency dataset on household wealth consistent with National Accounts statistics, addressing increasing interest and growing demand for timely, consistent and internationally comparable information on the distribution of assets and liabilities across households. By linking Quarterly Sector Accounts with household survey data, DWA provide new insights on the growth of household wealth in Ireland on a quarterly basis. The data indicate that the overall increase in the net wealth of Irish households over the past decade has been accompanied by a significant reduction in inequality. This was mainly driven by strong growth in the net wealth of households in the bottom half of the distribution. Yet, the wealthiest 10 per cent of Irish households are more than five times as rich as those in the poorer half of the distribution altogether. One reason for this is the considerable heterogeneity in the composition of households’ balance sheets and the increasing concentration of housing assets amongst richer households. Over the past decade, while those in the bottom half of the net wealth distribution mainly benefited from a reduction of their liabilities, the richest 10 per cent of households witnessed an increase of their assets’ value.