Globalisation and financialisation in the Netherlands, 1995-2020

In Chapter 6, Muysken and Meijers look at the increase in total assets of the financial sector in the Netherlands over the past 25 years from 600% of GDP in 1995 to over 1400% in 2020. There are specific features of the Dutch economy that caused the financial sector to continue to grow strongly even after the financial crisis. Two outstanding features are the continued growth of net trade surplus and the presence of a funded pension system with defined benefits. The authors analyse the growth of the financial sector in more detail using balance sheet data from the national account statistics. The explicit role of balance sheets and portfolios of financial assets of the various sectors in the model, together with the detailed impact of wealth effects on expenditure, makes it possible to identify the impact of financial sector operations in detail. In the present chapter, the authors employ the insights from their earlier analyses and the work of Meijers, Muysken and Sleijpen to construct a coherent data set from the national account data and to use these data to analyse the growth of the financial sector in the Netherlands over the past 25 years in a descriptive way.