Megan E Greene, Columnist

Germans Are Poorest in the Euro Area. Really?

April 10, 2013 at 2:41 PM UTC

She has been appointed as an external member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. She will take up her new duties on July 5, 2023. Currently, she is Global Chief Economist for the Kroll Institute, where she advises on the potential impact of global macroeconomic developments and policy on the firm’s business services and those of its clients. She serves as a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and also teaches at Schwarzman College (Tsinghua University) and the European University Institute. She is also the first Dame DeAnne Julius Senior Fellow in International Economics at Chatham House. She serves on the Academic Advisory Committee at the San Francisco Federal Reserve and writes a regular column on global macroeconomics for The Financial Times. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy from Princeton University and a Master of Science in International Relations from the University of Oxford. Previously, she was a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School and Global Chief Economist at John Hancock/Manulife Asset Management.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

With a title like "The Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey," the European Central Bank's latest piece in its Statistics Paper Series doesn't sound like a page-turner. It has received a lot of attention, though, because of its conclusion that the poorest households in the euro area are German.

These findings are likely to incite a lot of resentment among German taxpayers, who will no doubt feel all the more strongly that they shouldn't have to bailout other countries where households are even wealthier than theirs. So the study deserves some scrutiny.