Household debt and financial assets: evidence from Germany, Great Britain and the USA

an article by Sarah Brown and Karl Taylor (University of Sheffield) in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) Volume 171 Issue 3 (Page 615-643, June 2008)

Summary
The authors explore the determinants of debt, financial assets and net worth at the household level by using survey data for Germany, Great Britain and the USA. To identify which households are potentially vulnerable to adverse changes in the economic environment, they also explore the determinants of a range of measures of financial pressure:

• the probability that a household has negative net worth;
• the debt-to-income ratio;
• mortgage income gearing; and
• the saving-to-income ratio.

Their empirical findings suggest that the poorest and the youngest households are the most vulnerable to adverse changes in their financial circumstances.

Hazel's comment:
This could be considered the most contrived conjunction of posts I have ever achieved. Pure coincidence, I assure you, that the assessment of household finance comes immediately next to looking at the sustainability of economic welfare.
The former, this abstract, came in just today whilst the latter was several days old!

Simplifying the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare: methodology, data sources and a case study for The Netherlands

an article by Brent Bleys in International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment Volume 3 Number 2


Abstract
The compilation of the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) requires a large amount of data on a wide range of topics. Gathering these data is a very difficult task that has undoubtedly put off researchers in the past. First, this paper puts forward a Simplified ISEW (SISEW) that includes in its methodological framework only the quantitatively most important items. Reducing the number of items in the methodological framework of the ISEW does not only allow for an easier compilation of the index, also it indicates which items require most attention in the debate that will lead to an internationally-agreed-upon set of valuation methods. Next, the impact of working with the SISEW instead of the original ISEW is investigated for the studies on Belgium, the UK and Australia. Afterwards, the specific data needs for the items that satisfied the quantitative significance criterion are looked into and possible data sources for each item are reviewed. Finally, the SISEW is calculated for The Netherlands in order to see how readily available the data needed to compile the simplified index are in practice.

Hazel's comment:
I found, on reading this, that I was very rusty on economic welfare. There are, undoubtedly, better (as in more scholarly) places to refresh my brain but more accessible to the less academic among us (like me) is the Wikipedia entry.
I'm a great fan of Wikipedia as a starting point for finding out about different subjects. If you follow my example please always do some double checks on the references because there are some articles which are not simply less than informative but are actually disinformation. Most do, of course, get corrected fairly quickly but ... just my luck to find one when it was in a state of less than usefulness.