Household Social Contributions

Following a comment to an earlier post here is a quick table of actual social contributions made by households in the EU.  The data is for 2011 and some countries have missing values. 

This table excludes imputed social contributions which are largely pension contributions made by public sector workers to the government sector.  Public sector workers have deductions described as pension contributions (Irish public sector workers also have a “pension” levy) but these deductions are not used to fund pension benefits; the money is used to fund other current expenditures by government (or alternatively it can be viewed as not being given to the public sector workers in the first place).  Government pensions tend to be funded from current revenue rather than the accumulated savings of pension contributions. 

Anyway here are the actual social contributions made by the household sector across the EU.  The relevance is that the actual contributions made to government are included in Eurostat’s calculation of an implicit tax on labour whereas as contributions made to the private sector are not.  Click to enlarge.

Here is the proportion of household social contributions paid to the government sector in a selected group of countries.

• Greece    96.0%
• Spain    95.7%
• Austria    94.9%
• Finland    93.6%
• France    90.5%
• Italy    89.9%
• Belgium    84.4%
• Germany 82.8%
• Netherlands 63.5%
• Ireland    62.9%
• Sweden    56.9%
• United Kingdom 53.9%
• Denmark    12.6%

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