An IMGlobalWealth.com News Report
Greece has quietly crossed a significant economic threshold. According to recent European Central Bank data, examined in Alpha Bank*’s latest economic bulletin and reported by Ekathimerini, a leading and trusted Greek news source, total household wealth has now surpassed €1 trillion.
This marks a substantial rise from roughly €800 billion in early 2018, underscoring a broad recovery across household balance sheets.
Yet the distribution of these gains reveals a more uneven picture.Real estate remains the dominant form of wealth for most Greek households. Its centrality reflects decades of high home-ownership rates, which have traditionally cushioned families during economic shocks.
“Property still accounts for around 60% of total household wealth”
Property still accounts for around 60 percent of total household wealth, although its share has slipped from approximately 64 percent in 2018.
This shift does not reflect declining property values; rather, financial assets have been growing at a faster pace, altering the composition of national wealth.
Financial wealth, including deposits, equities, bonds, mutual funds, corporate shares, and life-insurance products, has expanded from 27 percent to 33 percent of total household wealth over the period.
This acceleration has disproportionately benefited higher-income households, who already hold significant exposure to such instruments. Alpha Bank’s analysis indicates that the top 10 percent of households now derive more than half of their wealth from financial assets, whereas the remaining 90 percent hold only about a fifth of their wealth in similar instruments.
For most households, property continues to be the primary, and often only, store of wealth.Despite this widening divide, Greece still displays lower wealth inequality than the Eurozone average.
ECB distributional data for 2024 show that the poorest half of households across the Eurozone collectively hold just 5 percent of net wealth. In Greece, they hold 12 percent.
Meanwhile, the top 10 percent own 57 percent of Eurozone wealth, compared with 45 percent in Greece, a difference largely explained by Greece’s unusually high home-ownership rates.
However, the structure of wealth remains imbalanced. Financial products such as investment funds, bonds, and life-insurance instruments are almost absent among the bottom 90 percent of Greek households, whereas they are more commonly held by equivalent groups elsewhere in Europe.
As wealth grows, the challenge for Greece will be ensuring that financial deepening does not remain the preserve of a narrow elite.
* Alpha Bank, one of Greece’s leading banks, produces economic bulletins that analyse ECB data and wider financial trends.
