Household savings in Sweden amounted to SEK 82 billion (€7.29 billion) in the first quarter of 2024, the same level as in the first quarter of last year, new data from Statistics Sweden has found.
Households’ financial net wealth as a percentage of GDP increased by 21 percentage points compared with the same period of the previous year.
Household net borrowing, i.e., their new loans minus amortisation, remained low in the first quarter and amounted to SEK 13 billion (€1.16 billion). This is an increase of SEK 10 billion (€0.89 billion) compared to the previous quarter and an increase of SEK 9 billion (€0.8 billion) compared to the corresponding quarter in 2023.
Household debt to GDP
From the first quarter of 1996, when data on household savings in Sweden was first collected, to the first quarter of 2024, the household debt-to-GDP ratio has doubled, increasing from 43% to 88%, Statistics Sweden said.
During the same period, financial net wealth as a share of GDP has more than tripled, going from 75% to 246%. This means that household financial assets have increased at a faster rate than liabilities.
During the pandemic, this difference in growth rate increased in connection with the price increases in assets such as stocks and tenant-owned apartments.
The distribution between household financial assets has been stable over time. Despite the fact that the stock market, according to Affärsvärldens Generalindex, has increased by an average of 8% per year since 1996, the share of stock in households’ financial assets has not increased by more than 4 percentage points during the same period.
Households’ financial assets, share in percent of total
Government debt ratio
Elsewhere, the government debt ratio, which is the total market-valued government debt as a percentage of GDP, has decreased by 48 percentage points since the start of the time series. The traces of the financial crisis in the 1990s caused the government debt ratio to be 82% of GDP in 1995, before peaking in 1998 at 88%.
Since 1998, the government debt ratio has declined. In some years, it has slightly increased, only to decrease again – for example, between 2019 and 2020, the government debt ratio increased by six percentage points, from 40% to 46%, with the pandemic a core reason for this.
Since 2020, the central government debt ratio has decreased by four percentage points per year, and at the end of 2023, it amounted to 34% of GDP, which is the lowest ratio since 1995.
The total market-valued debt of local government as a percentage of GDP has had a steadier development since the start of the time series, from 9% in 1995 to 22% in 2023. The only decrease in the time series is between 2020 and 2021, the period when local government received grants from the central government due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In the first quarter of 2024, the central government debt ratio continued to decline and ended up at 34%. The local government debt ratio was at the same level as at the end of 2023, at 22%.
