Cross-Country Comparability of the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey

The ECB recently published the first results of the euro area Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) and a report on the methodologies applied (ECB, 2013a and 2013b). The fact that the HFCS results vary considerably across the euro area gives rise to questions regarding their comparability. We question the focus on mean and median country rankings and argue for comparisons along the full unconditional net wealth distributions. Such analyses reveal large within-country variation as well as remarkable similarities between countries with regard to the distributions of net wealth. We discuss the relevance of household size and homeownership in this context and point out important caveats with regard to the interpretation of results. In the appendix we summarize relevant methodological differences which need to be taken into account in case of cross-country comparisons.