Survey of household finances (EFF) 2011: methods, results and changes since 2008

The Spanish Survey of Household Finances (“EFF” by its Spanish acronym) is a survey by the Banco de España which allows the linking of income, assets, debt and spending of each household unit. The fourth edition of the EFF (EFF2011), referring to December 2011, has been designed to give continuity to this statistical source, from which data were collected for the first time in 2002 and subsequently in 2005 and 2008. The EFF2011 updates the information on household finances and thus allows an assessment of the changes in the financial position of Spanish households in the period from the end of the first quarter of 2009 (2009 Q1) to end-2011, while offering a more up-to-date picture of the composition of household assets and debts. An important characteristic of the four editions of the EFF is that a large number of highwealth households have been surveyed. The distribution of assets is heavily skewed and, moreover, some of them are only held by a small fraction of the population. Therefore, if a very large number of households cannot be interviewed, it is important to oversample the wealthiest households, as indeed the EFF does, to ensure that the sample is representative not only of the population as a whole, but also of the aggregate wealth of the economy, in order to facilitate the study of financial behaviour at the top of the wealth distribution. Another important characteristic of the EFF is that, from the second edition onwards, some of the households that participated in previous editions have been re-interviewed. Thus the EFF2002, EFF2005, EFF2008 and EFF2011 samples contain a common sub-set of households that can be observed at various points in time and, in some cases, over a period of nearly ten years. This expands the possibilities for analysing the behaviour of income, wealth and consumption over the household life cycle. These characteristics (which are highly desirable for a survey of this kind) have been obtained by means of a system of blind collaboration with the National Statistics Institute (“INE” by its Spanish acronym) and the tax authorities (TA), which respects strict tax confidentiality requirements and response anonymity. However, first and foremost, we are most grateful for the generosity of the households that have participated in this project, especially those that have participated in various waves of the EFF. This article describes the results of the EFF2011 and the changes observed in the financial position of households between the first quarter of 2009 Q1 and the end of 2011. It also contains a box summarising the main methodological characteristics of the EFF2011 (see Box 1), which are described in more detail in Bover (2014). The first section reviews some important aspects of the socio-economic background in the period from 2009 to 2011. The second section presents the results for household income and net wealth. The third section analyses households’ holdings of real and financial assets. The fourth section provides information on the debt and debt burden of households, while the fifth section focuses on aspects relating to spending. Finally, the sixth section contains some concluding remarks. The distributions of most of the important variables, such as those relating to the various assets and debts, have very high values for a relatively small number of households. Typical values of the distribution are therefore better approximated by the median than by the mean, so this is the statistic included in the tables. All the variables relating to income, wealth, debt and spending levels are expressed in 2011 euro using the consumer price index (CPI) as deflator.