Multidimensional Affluence in Income and Wealth in the Eurozone: A Cross-Country Comparison Using the HFCS

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint distribution of income and wealth. The results indicate that, with the exception of Cyprus, France, Italy and Slovenia, less than 10% of households are affluent in both income and net wealth. Investigating the joint distributions of income and net wealth confirms that France demonstrates a more homogenous distribution of richness among affluent households compared to other countries in the sample. Portugal demonstrates a higher concentration of richness in the hands of a few compared to the majority of other countries in the sample. The degree of countries' affluence rankings differs with respect to the measures of multidimensional affluence considered.