Household wealth in Italy and in advanced countries

Diego Caprara (), Riccardo De Bonis and Luigi Infante

No 470, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: The paper studies the long-term evolution of household wealth in order to compare the changes in Italian financial wealth and real wealth with those of the most advanced countries. In Italy householdsï¿½ real wealth is 5.5 times disposable income, while housing wealth is 4.6 times, and financial wealth is 3.8 times disposable income. Therefore total gross wealth is around 9.3 times disposable income. Given that household liabilities make up 80 per cent of disposable income, total net wealth is 8.5 times income. In France and Spain household non-financial wealth also exceeds that of financial assets, while the contrary holds in the United States and in Germany. In Italy the ratio of gross financial wealth to disposable income is in line with that in France, greater than in Spain and Germany, and smaller than in the USA, Japan, the UK, and Canada. With the exception of Germany and Japan, changes in financial assets are mainly due to price changes in financial instruments ï¿½ holding gains or losses ï¿½ rather than to financial transactions. In the last two decades the financial portfolio of Italian households has become more similar to the average portfolio of the advanced economies. Italian household debt is the lowest by international comparison.

Keywords: financial wealth; households; non-financial wealth; debts; financial accounts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E01 E21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-eur and nep-mac
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_470_18

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