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CONCLUSION

The distribution by household groups of the national accounts household income, consumption and wealth estimates presented in this publication provides a bridge between the macroeconomic aggregate household estimates produced within the Australian System of National Accounts and the ABS household economic resource surveys distributional analysis of household income, consumption and wealth. The data presented in this publication is an expansion of the 2009-10 data released in Information Paper: Australian National Accounts, Distribution of Household Income, Consumption and Wealth, 2009-10 (cat. no. 5204.0.55.009), in that a time series from 2003-04 to 2011-12 has been constructed and the time series estimates have been compiled with some minor updates to the previous methodology.

The ABS national accounts area are among only a few national statistical offices (NSO) that have produced time series of the household distributional data set and accompanying analysis, the ABS is aware of some time series data and analysis produced by Statistics Netherlands and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. As such, the ABS feels this body of work is still in its pioneering stage, and believe in time as more NSOs produce such data and analysis, ABS will be able to share methodological and compilation best practise which in turn will enhance the data sets and analysis.

The household distributional results presented in this paper complement the aggregate estimates for household income, consumption and wealth for 2003-04, 2005-06, 2007-08, 2009-10 and 2011-12 published in the household sectoral accounts in the 2012-13 issue of the Australian System of National Accounts (cat. no. 5204.0). The distributional analysis of the time series in this release may be employed to address macroeconomic policy questions not otherwise possible with aggregate time series estimates of the household sector from the ASNA. The questions that can be answered may be broadly categorised to those related to a household group's (i) contribution to growth in income (consumption, net saving and net worth) and (ii) material living standards, such questions as:

• which household group benefitted from the increase in gross disposable income, and their components such as interest and dividend receivable during the period 2003-04 to 2011-12;
• what was the saving behaviour of household groups before, during and after the global financial crisis (GFC);
• which household groups are investing in superannuation (insurance technical reserves), and over time which household groups are benefitting from growth in superannuation technical reserves;
• for a household group, what is the contribution of social transfer kind in health to the overall growth in actual individual consumption per household;
• for household groups, what is the contribution of residential dwelling and land to growth overtime in net worth per household; and
• what is the impact on gross disposable income per household for household groups with a change in taxation policy.