Household Debt to Income Ratio
Get the Household Debt to Disposable Income Ratio for a variety of countries over time from the OECD’s Household Dashboard. This expresses total household gross debt (loans and debt securities) as a share of household gross disposable income, returned as a decimal ratio (1.0014 means debt equals 100.14% of income).
It is a standard household-leverage indicator used in financial-stability analysis: a high or rapidly rising ratio signals households are more exposed to income shocks or interest rate increases (debt-servicing costs rise directly with rates on variable-rate or refinanced debt), and has historically preceded credit-cycle downturns (e.g. in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis). It is the household- sector analogue to government debt (see get_government_debt_to_gdp_ratio) - the two together give a fuller picture of an economy’s overall leverage.
See definition: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?df[ds]=dsDisseminateFinalDMZ&df[id]=DSD_HHDASH%40DF_HHDASH_INDIC
Also known as: household leverage ratio, debt-to-income ratio.
Household Debt to Income Ratio in Python or via the MCP
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_household_debt_to_income_ratio as shown below.
from financetoolkit import Economics
economics = Economics(start_date='2015-01-01', end_date='2022-12-31')
economics.get_household_debt_to_income_ratio(
countries=['United States', 'Australia'],
quarterly=False)
Or, after setting up the Finance Toolkit MCP, ask:
How did household debt relative to disposable income develop in the United States and Australia each year from 2015 to 2022?
Which returns:
| United States | Australia | |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 1.0396 | 1.86 |
| 2016 | 1.0384 | 1.9308 |
| 2017 | 1.0265 | 1.9843 |
| 2018 | 1.0014 | 1.9888 |
| 2019 | 0.9955 | 1.9676 |
| 2020 | 0.9533 | 1.8811 |
| 2021 | 0.9625 | 1.9168 |
| 2022 | 1.0163 | 1.9253 |
Parameters
get_household_debt_to_income_ratio accepts the following parameters.
| Parameter | Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
countries | list[str] | str | None | The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None. | ["United States", "Germany"] |
quarterly | bool | None | Whether to return the quarterly data (True) or the annual data (False). Defaults to None, which returns the quarterly data, the highest frequency the OECD publishes. | True |
rolling | int | The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None. | 4 |
trailing | int | The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None. | 4 |
growth | bool | Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False. | True |
lag | int | The number of periods to lag the data by. Defaults to 1. | 4 |
standardize | bool | Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False. | True |
rounding | int | None | The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None. | 2 |