Multidimensional Affluence in Income and Wealth in the Eurozone - A Cross Country Comparison Using the HFCS

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint distribution of income and wealth. The results indicate that the percentage of households affluent both in income and net wealth are less than 10% except in Cyprus, France, Italy and Slovenia. Investigating the joint distributions of income and net wealth yields that France demonstrates a more homogenous distribution of richness among affluent households compared to the other countries in the sample. Portugal demonstrates a higher concentration of richness in the hands of few compared to most of the other countries in the sample. The degree of countries’ affluence rankings differs with respect to the measures of multidimensional affluence considered.

Kontbay-Busun, Sine und Andreas Peichl (2014), Multidimensional Affluence in Income and Wealth in the Eurozone - A Cross Country Comparison Using the HFCS, ZEW Discussion Paper Nr. 14-124, Mannheim.