Wealth Disparities in New Zealand: Final Report

Abstract

Over the period 2002 to 2010, Statistics New Zealand carried out a longitudinal survey known as the Survey of Family, Income and Employment (SoFIE). Some eight waves of data were collected. In every second wave (2003/2004, 2005/2006, 2007/2008 and 2009/2010), respondents were asked questions about their wealth holdings. In 2007 Statistics New Zealand published a paper by Jit Cheung, ‘Wealth Disparities in New Zealand’, based on data from wave 2 (2003/2004). This paper provided an overview of net worth disparity, giving information by mean and by median, and other distribution information including the Gini coefficient and other percentile-based information. Results were also analysed by age, by major ethnic group, by family type, and also by gender, personal income decile, and region. In November 2015, we published a paper, ‘Wealth Disparities in New Zealand: Preliminary Report Providing Updated Data from SOFIE’ (IGPS working paper 15/02), which updated the Cheung 2007 paper to include data from waves 4, 6 and 8 of SoFIE. As promised in that paper, we have now extended our research on wealth disparities by using the SoFIE data to investigate two further areas: 1. In Part 1, a longitudinal analysis looking at the extent to which survey respondents in specified wealth sub-divisions moved between such sub-divisions over the course of the survey; and 2. In Part 2, an asset class analysis looking at how wealth holdings across the spectrum are divided among the different classes, for both assets and liabilities. Note that the results presented here for wave 2 differ a little from the original results owing to changes made to SoFIE population weightings after 2007.