Income, Wealth and Intergenerational Inequality in the Netherlands

Emiel Afman

No 53, European Economy - Economic Briefs from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission

Abstract: This economic brief brings together publicly available income and wealth data and finds that the distribution of income among Dutch households is relatively stable and flat by international standards. Inequalities in net wealth holdings are relatively large. This is to a large extent a debt-driven phenomenon and related to the large number of Dutch households with low and sometimes negative net housing equity. Addressing household debt, e.g. by lowering the debt bias for households in the tax system, would strengthen household balance sheets and lower wealth-risks for households. In intergenerational terms, the position of the baby boom generation stands out. Both in terms of income and wealth, they are much richer than all other generations. However, their wealth position doesn’t deviate much from what one could expect based on theoretical or synthetic counterfactuals, based on actual income and saving patterns. Millennials (born after 1980) seem to have started their working lives at lower real incomes than previous generations.

Keywords: Netherlands; income inequality; wealth inequality; intergenerational inequality; debt bias; household debt; households; economic brief; Afman. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D04 D31 D63 E62 H23 I30 J10 J11 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/publications/ ... ality-netherlands_en (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:euf:ecobri:053

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in European Economy - Economic Briefs from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECFIN INFO ().