The Household Finance Survey : Description of the 2009 Survey and Main Results on Households’ Income, Wealth and Debt in Greece

The paper presents the methodology and the main results of the Household Finance Survey 2009, which was conducted by the Bank of Greece as part of the first wave of the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). According to the survey, the indicators of indebtedness of Greek households in 2009 were slightly lower than the corresponding ones for most of the euro area countries and the indicators of financial pressure were for the majority of households within limits that are considered tolerable. The wealth of Greek households, as captured by the survey in 2009, was composed mainly by real estate. Greece had a high degree of both home ownership and of ownership of other real estate, in comparison with the other countries in the euro area, which could be partly explained by the relative high percentage of gifts and inheritances. With regard to net wealth, despite the lower mean relative to the euro area mean net wealth, the median household in 2009 had net wealth close the median euro area household, a finding that was attributed to the high homeownership rate in Greece and the relative high house prices at the time of the survey