On Household Wealth Trends in Sweden over the 1990s

Influenced by major tax reform in the early 1990s and by the exceptional boom in the stock market at the end of that decade, overall wealth in Swedish households increased. So did wealth inequality. The large baby-boom cohorts of the 1940s have been successful in accumulating wealth and they also have large claims on the public pension system. The wealth implicit in the form of these claims dominates private wealth in most Swedish households, and in this paper it is argued that private life-cycle savings have been small in Sweden. Most household saving has been done though the public pension systems. However, concern about the future viability of the pension systems probably increased private life-cycle savings in the 1990s.