Gold reserves of national central banks per capita in Europe

Gold reserves of national central banks per capita in Europe
by Jakub Marian

Most na­tional cent­ral banks in Europe hold a large amount of re­serves in the form of for­eign bank­notes and de­pos­its, treas­ury bills, gold, and other as­sets, which are called in­ter­na­tional re­serves (or for­eign-ex­change re­serves in pop­u­lar usage, which, tech­nic­ally speak­ing, should only refer to re­serves held in a for­eign cur­rency).

The main reason for a cent­ral bank to hold any kind of re­serve is to be able to im­ple­ment its mon­et­ary policy, and gold re­serves may ex­pand or shrink as cent­ral bankers see fit, so dif­fer­ences in the size of gold re­serves (and for­eign-ex­change re­serves in gen­eral) do not ne­ces­sar­ily in­dic­ate dif­fer­ences in the wealth of na­tions.

The map below shows the gold re­serves of European na­tional cent­ral banks in grams per cap­ita as of May 2017; that is, if a cent­ral bank were to dis­trib­ute the gold it pos­sesses to all in­hab­it­ants of the coun­try equally, every in­hab­it­ant would re­ceive the amount shown in the map.

For com­par­ison, here are the cor­res­pond­ing fig­ures for sev­eral other major na­tions: United States: 25.5; Japan: 6.0; China: 1.4; India: 0.4; Brazil: 0.3.


By the way, I have writ­ten sev­eral edu­ca­tional ebooks. If you get

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