Are Germans really poorer than Spaniards, Italians and Greeks? | vox - 0 views
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From this survey it appeared that the median German household had the lowest wealth of all Eurozone countries
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The median households in countries like Belgium, Spain and Italy appear to be three to four times wealthier than the median German household. Even the median Greek household is twice as wealthy as the German one.
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A comparison of the median and mean wealth reveals something about the distribution of wealth in each country. If the largest difference is between the mean and the median, the greater is the inequality in the distribution of wealth.
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We find that in Germany the median household in the top 20% of the income class has 74 times more wealth than the median household in the bottom 20% of the income class. Judged by this criterion Germany has the most unequal distribution of wealth in the Eurozone.
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Wealth per capita is more than twice as high in northern European countries than in southern countries such as Greece and Portugal.
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The facts are that Germany is significantly richer than southern Eurozone countries like Spain, Greece and Portugal. There does seem to be a problem of the distribution of wealth in Germany: First, wealth in Germany is highly concentrated in the upper part of the household-income distribution. Second, a large part of German wealth is not held by households and therefore must be held by the corporate sector or the government.