Developing reconciled quarterly distributional national wealth – insight into inequality and wealth structures

Distributional accounts for households enable measurement, study developments andidentify drivers of inequality. Distributional information on households’ wealth is availablefrom the Household Finance and Consumption Survey only for three points in time (2009 –2018), while aggregates are available quarterly. This paper presents a novel methodology forderiving quarterly distributional national wealth by (i) improving the alignment of surveyfieldwork periods with the national accounts’ dates; (ii) correcting for differences in severalconcepts; (iii) estimating missing wealthy households; (iv) developing time series; and (v)computing euro area aggregates. This paper finds an increase in the net wealth Gini of mosteuro area countries since 2009; that the richest 1% holds 28% of total net wealth, while thebottom 50% holds 4%; and that the net wealth of the top 1% has grown by almost 50%,compared to 28% for the remaining 99%, with a decrease in the bottom 20%. JEL Classification: C46, D31, E27, G51, N34