Abstract

There is a strong demand for high quality information on how different household groups in society are faring. Distributional results aligned to important macroeconomic aggregates such as GDP, household disposable income, and household wealth are crucial in this regard, providing insight in key dimensions of material well-being across household groups. In addition to enabling a broader scope for analyses by linking the results to macroeconomic aggregates, the results also provide a more comprehensive picture of economic inequality, including elements that are often not covered in inequality statistics, and capturing households and transactions that are typically underrepresented in micro data.

The past years have seen several initiatives to address this demand. For example, the OECD and Eurostat developed guidance to estimate distributional results on income, consumption and savings in line with national accounts totals under the Expert Group on Distributional National Accounts (EG DNA), with experimental results already available for a range of economies. In the area of wealth, the ECB Expert Group on Distributional Financial Accounts (EG DFA) did extensive work on developing distributional financial and non-financial balance sheets for the household sector in the euro area and EU economies. Furthermore, various countries have begun to develop distributional results on wealth, with a few economies already publishing results.

Whereas good progress has been made over the past years, a lot more work is needed to arrive at more granular measures of inequality across a wider set of countries which track household conditions in a timely manner. This is one of the main reasons why the new G20 Data Gaps Initiative (DGI) includes two specific recommendations on the development of distributional national accounts, one focusing on income, consumption and saving (recommendation 8) and one on wealth (recommendation 9).

In light of the above, the OECD will continue the work of the EG DNA and has launched a new Expert Group of the Distribution of Household Wealth (EG DHW) to develop harmonised templates and methodology to compile distributional results on wealth in line with national accounts totals, with the aim to have a broad range of countries publishing distributional wealth results by the end of 2026. This presentation will provide an overview of the ongoing work the EG DNA and the plans for the new EG DHW. It will highlight the main aims of the work, the basic methodology and some of the specific challenges in the compilation process, and some of the results from this work.