Introduction

Over the period 2002 to 2010, Statistics New Zealand carried out a longitudinal survey known as the Survey of Family, Income and Employment (SoFIE). Some eight waves of data were collected. Every second wave (2003/2004, 2005/2006, 2007/2008, and 2009/2010), respondents were asked questions about their wealth holdings.

In 2007 Statistics New Zealand published a paper by Jit Cheung, Wealth Disparities in New Zealand, based on data from wave 2. That paper provided an overview of net worth disparity, giving information by mean and by median, and other distribution information including the Gini coefficient and other percentile-based information. Results were also analysed by age, by major ethnic group, by family type, and also by gender, personal income decile, and region.

This preliminary paper is the initial part of a project to use data from those waves. The project has two principal purposes:

1. To update the Cheung 2007 paper to include data from waves 4, 6 and 8 of SoFIE; and in addition to extend the format of the results reported by Cheung based on wave 2 of SoFIE to include information as to the extent to which survey respondents in specified wealth sub- divisions moved between such sub-divisions over the course of the survey.
2. To demonstrate the richness of the information gathered by SoFIE and to encourage further exploration of the survey’s wealth data.

In view of interest already expressed in the project, this preliminary paper provides updates to the main tables provided in the 2007 Cheung paper, using data from all four waves. As a departure from the usual approach for IGPS working papers, little interpretation of results is given; this will be contained in the final paper.

Researchers are invited to take the results provided in this preliminary paper as a starting point for discussion of policy issues pertaining to the distribution of wealth, and to make their own in-depth investigations to illuminate the disparate processes of wealth accumulation. The authors welcome feedback as to particular areas of analysis suggested by the data in this paper.

The final paper will include the longitudinal analysis mentioned above. This will be based on the data for the surviving respondents in wave 8, and analyse movement between quintiles in their net wealth holdings over the survey period, according to their wave 8 ethnicity, family type, age group, income quintile, gender and region. We plan to include some simple analysis of those who dropped out between waves, to the extent this is feasible.

Finally, please note that the results presented here for wave 2 differ a little from the original results as the result of changes made to SoFIE population weightings after 2007. Also, the separate analysis in the 2007 paper of the position of individuals with negative net worth has not been repeated; we took the view that to be useful, this had to be done in more depth than was possible in the 2007 paper format.