The household sector in the NIE

There are some neat modifications of the tables published in National Income and Expenditure (NIE) accounts included with the 2017 update.  Recent years and have seem improvements in how the household sector is covered in the accounts and this continued with the publication of the full set of tables for the 2017 NIE.  There is a useful information note here.

Here is a table setting out the gross disposable income of households in nominal terms.  This is after tax and transfers with the “gross” referring to depreciation. Click to enlarge.

The main use of disposable income by households is consumption and the main consumption items for the same year are set out in the following table.

After consumption expenditure in 2017 households had just over €10 billion available for capital formation (investment) or net lending.  If investment expenditure was more than €10 billion then the household sector would be a net lender as the sum of consumption and investment expenditure could not be funded from disposable income.

We don’t get insight into this from the NIE accounts but we will do so from the Institutional Sector Accounts (ISAs).  The 2017 ISA annual figures will be published in the next few weeks where we will hopefully see the extent to which the household sector is a net lender (i.e. using some of that €10 billion shown above to repay debt).