The system is mandatory for all workers at companies that are part of the agreement. In this system, 4.5 per cent of labour income is allocated up to a cut-off point. If a worker earns more than the cut-off amount, 30 per cent of the difference is added to the original allocation.4 The individual also has a number of investment options to choose from in this system. Once again, the conclusion here is that pension wealth among those included in this pension scheme agreement is more evenly distributed than other wealth. Another way of expressing this is that many people in Sweden do not own their own home and have no financial assets but as a result of their labour income, they benefit from elevated asset prices as they have a share in funded collective pension systems. So how many of them are there? We don’t know at present, as no wealth statistics on the individual level have been recorded since 2007. A government inquiry has recently started to look at whether Sweden shall once again compile wealth statistics on the individual level.5 The Riksbank has been stressing for a long time the importance of reintroducing these statistics as soon as possible. An important reason is that household indebtedness has shown a rising trend in recent years and we now know more about households’ debt than about their assets.
Waldenström, Daniel (2016), “The National Wealth of Sweden, 1810–2014”, Scandinavian Economic History Review 64(1), pp. 36–54. Waldenström, D (2017) “Wealth-income ratios in a small, developing economy: Sweden, 1810-2010”, Journal of Economic History 77(1), pp. 285-313. 6 [6]