The Financial Asset and Liability in Japanese Household Statistics

This paper examines the possible differences exist among each survey data of household assets and liabilities in Japan, comparing the most representative statistics. There are differences between individual statistical surveys in the distributions of financial assets and liabilities and on an average basis. The differences could be made by differences in the characteristics of sample households and in the questionnaire format. The fact that the averages of total financial assets in a survey are small relative to those in other statistics may be not only because of the attributes of samples such as the age of the household head but also because of the questionnaire designed so as to ask about the total amount of financial assets without a breakdown by asset type, a fact which may have led to understatement of the asset amounts. Meanwhile, what is notable about one survey is that the proportion of households which replied that they did not own financial assets has been markedly large in recent years compared with other surveys. Moreover, comparison of statistical surveys with figures obtained from macroeconomic statistics shows that the survey figures are smaller than the estimates based on macroeconomic statistics. Of this gap, only 25% in the case of assets and only 40% in the case of debts was explicitly explainable due to the concept and definition of the statistics. When analyzing assets and debts using statistical survey data, it is necessary to pay attention to the characteristics of individual surveys and the differences in the coverage of each statistics including the difference in definition from macro statistics.