Income inequality and household indebtedness in OECD countries over the period 1995–2014

Abstract

The paper aims at evaluation of relationship between the level of income inequality and the extent of household sector indebtedness in the OECD countries over the period 1995–2014. Prior investigations of this issue were focused mainly on the U.S. economy and suggested that one of the reasons for a rapid surge in indebtedness of households was an increase of income disparities in the society. The present paper attempts to examine this phenomenon in a broader international context. The research was based on the data available in the OECD Statistics database and involved analyses of parametric and non-parametric correlations. The results indicate significant disparities in directions and strength of analysed relationships in the examined sample of countries. In the majority of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries an increase (decrease) of income inequality was accompanied by an increase (decrease) in the extent of household indebtedness, which is consistent with the results of prior research. In the case of poorer but fastest developing economies, however, an opposite relationship was found. Statistically significant negative correlations occurred also in several other developed economies. Hence, the results of the research do not allow to extend conclusions flowing from the prior studies on this matter onto the whole collectivity of developed countries and indicate that changes in income disparities in particular economies do not affect the extent of household indebtedness unambiguously. Therefore it seems that direction and strength of this relationship may be determined by country-specific economic, social, demographic, psychological or cultural factors.