IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ecb/ecbart/202100032.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The role of households in financing government debt in euro area

Author

Listed:
  • Pavot, Jeanne
  • Valenta, Vilém

Abstract

The experience of the last ten years shows that the composition of government debt plays an important role in several analytical and policy domains such as public debt management, financial stability and sovereign debt sustainability. Against this background, the article provides an overview of the evolution of the structure of public debt by holder in euro area countries and explores in more detail the structure of domestically held government debt with a special focus on households. In the first decade of EMU, the share of foreign holdings of euro area government debt, including both creditors from other euro area countries and creditors from outside the euro area, has been increasing owing to deepening financial integration. Following the global financial crisis and the euro area sovereign debt crisis, the share of domestic holdings increased again, first driven by holdings of banks and other financial corporations and, since 2015, mainly by central banks’ holdings. The role of households’ direct holdings of government debt is relatively limited at around 2% of total government debt in the euro area, although it is more sizeable in several euro area countries and in some other advanced economies. However, considering indirect holdings through investment funds, insurance corporations and pension funds, the share of households in financing government debt is more significant, albeit slightly decreasing over time, and amounted to almost 16% in the euro area in 2020. JEL Classification: H6, H1, E21

Suggested Citation

  • Pavot, Jeanne & Valenta, Vilém, 2021. "The role of households in financing government debt in euro area," Economic Bulletin Articles, European Central Bank, vol. 3.
  • Handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbart:2021:0003:2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/economic-bulletin/articles/2021/html/ecb.ebart202103_02~6612ab7923.en.html
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. António Afonso & José Alves & Sofia Monteiro, 2024. "Echoes of Instability: How Geopolitical Risks Shape Government Debt Holdings," CESifo Working Paper Series 11235, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Government debt; Households financial wealth;

    JEL classification:

    • H6 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt
    • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbart:2021:0003:2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Official Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/emieude.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.