This page puts together a series of interesting empirical facts that I believe very few people know about.

Inflation and Taxation

Few people are aware of the fact that taxes in the euro area increase twice as fast as consumer prices measured by the HICP. Taxes represent the price that households pay for public goods, but they play no role in official inflation measurements.

Wealth-to-income Ratios

Between the introduction of the euro as an accounting currency in 1999 and the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2007, housing prices in France have doubled. At the same time the net wealth to net income ratio in France has increased substantially. The wealth-to-income ratio is an indicator of social mobility: the higher it is the longer it takes to climb up the wealth ladder in society with a given income. We observe a similar development in Germany where housing prices have doubled since the financial crisis. House price inflation is a form of asset price inflation that is not taken into account in official inflation numbers and that drives up the wealth-to-income ratio.