Best Bitcoin Exchange for Luxembourg

In the financial centre Luxembourg there is a lively interest in the crypto currency sector. But what about the population of Luxembourg? The survey institute TNS Ilres has looked into the subject.

In February of this year, a total of 535 people from Luxembourg were interviewed by the survey institute on the subject of crypto currencies. The results: Slightly more than half of those surveyed (63 percent) said they knew nothing or very little about the topic.

Only 37 percent of respondents said they were familiar with the topic. Interestingly, it plays a role whether women or men are interviewed. According to the survey institute, a good half of the men declared that they were well informed, compared to only 27 percent of the women. In return, around a third of women (12 percent of men) said they had never heard of the topic.

However, the sector is now established in Luxembourg as a financial centre. With bitFlyer and Bitstamp, two of the world’s largest crypto trading centres have already found their way into the Grand Duchy. Trading turnover of several hundred million euros per day is recorded here.

While some countries are considering whether Bitcoin and Co. should be banned, others, including Japan and Luxembourg, have already recognised crypto currencies as “money”. When the Luxembourg financial supervisory authority decided this in 2014, it justified the step with the fact that altogether enough people accepted the crypto currencies as means of payment.

Eight percent have entered the market

But in Luxembourg it is not only the financial centre and the financial regulators that are keen to experiment. The population is also open-minded. A whopping eight percent (44 people out of 535 respondents) told TNS Ilres that they had already bought crypto currencies.

The investors from Luxembourg have above all bet on Bitcoin, the best-known of the crypto currencies. They also found the crypto currencies Ethereum, Bitcoin-Cash, Ripple, Litecoin, Stellar and Eos interesting.

With a percentage of eight percent, Luxembourg is probably in the middle of the world rankings. In most European countries this rate is estimated to be significantly lower. In Asian countries such as Japan or South Korea, on the other hand, the share of Bitcoin investors in the population could be about three times higher than in Luxembourg.

Although Luxembourgers are keen to experiment, they are also cautious. Only two percent of those surveyed who are involved in this field have invested more than 10,000 euros in this highly speculative field. It should be noted that 27 percent of the respondents did not answer this question.

According to the survey institute TNS Ilres, 20 percent of Luxembourgers have converted less than 500 euros into crypto currencies – probably to get to know the sector better. 28 percent said they had invested between 500 and 2,500 euros in crypto currencies. Thus, there seems to be an awareness in the population for the fact that this investment is highly speculative.

Economy

Luxembourg is part of the European single market; together with 18 other EU member states (blue) it forms a monetary union, the euro zone.

According to a study by the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat), the average income is two and a half times higher than that of the average European. The average wealth of a household in Luxembourg is 570,000 euros; foreign residents tend to be significantly wealthier. This applies to a minority of foreign citizens, since by far the largest foreign community, the Portuguese, contributes little to the high foreign average wealth. The purchasing power standard of a Luxembourger is 253 per cent of the EU average (Germany: 116 per cent). Luxembourg’s per capita gross domestic product is the highest in the world, apart from the principalities of Liechtenstein and Monaco. The total value of all goods and services produced in the Luxembourg economy in 2009 and used for final consumption amounts to 104,512 US dollars per capita. Luxembourg is thus well ahead of Norway (79,085 US dollars), Qatar (68,872 US dollars) and Switzerland (67,560 US dollars). The gross domestic product of the city of Luxembourg is 213 percent of the EU average. Only Greater London (315 percent) and the Brussels-Capital Region (234 percent) have higher values. In the Global Competitiveness Index, which measures a country’s competitiveness, Luxembourg ranks 19th out of 137 countries (2017-2018). In the Index for Economic Freedom, Luxembourg ranks 14th out of 180 countries in 2017.

Most statistics concerning Luxembourg are distorted by a factor of two and 0.5 respectively. The reason for this is that in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg about half of all employees are cross-border commuters and therefore non-residents, who together with the inhabitants generate the gross national product in Luxembourg and pay the same taxes and social contributions as the inhabitants. Consequently, in such cases there are correspondingly distorted results, e.g. in gross national product per capita or purchasing power per capita, etc., in which only one half, namely the inhabitants, are taken into account, but not the other half, namely the cross-border commuters.

Eurostat reported on 15 December 2009

“In 2008, GDP per inhabitant in Luxembourg, expressed in Purchasing Power Standards (PPS), was more than two and a half times the EU27 average, while Ireland and the Netherlands were about a third higher. Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium were between 15% and 25% above the EU27 average”.

The gross domestic product per capita of the population is measured in purchasing power standards in order to enable an international comparison without differences in price levels. In the case of Luxembourg, this ratio is distorted because, although a high proportion of the workforce contributes to the country’s value added, as non-residents it is not included in the denominator of the ratio. In 2009, of the 335,700 people employed in the country, only 188,300 lived in the country itself, the remaining 147,400 were cross-border commuters. For another reason, this ratio is only of limited use for making a statement about the actual standard of living of the Luxembourg population: The gross domestic product contains expenditures such as gross investments (means of production, state services, …), which have nothing directly to do with the consumption of private households.

A more realistic picture is obtained by comparing the GDP/per capita of population statistics by economic region, not by country. Even in this statistical comparison, commuter flows falsify the picture, because the productive performance of commuters is also attributed to economic centres here.

On 1 January each year, Statec, the official statistics service, publishes an annual survey of Luxembourg companies, in alphabetical order on the one hand and sorted by economic sector on the other. The American Chamber of Commerce in Luxembourg ASBL (AMCHAM) is a voluntary organisation that aims to bridge the gap between US companies and the Luxembourg economy.

Income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, which was around 0.26 in 2005 according to the OECD study, was higher than in Denmark and Sweden and lower than the EU and OECD averages.

In autumn 2008, an economic crisis began in many of the world’s industrialised countries. This economic crisis exacerbated the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone because many EU countries pumped billions of euros into their banking sectors to avert bank failures. The crisis shows how dependent the Luxembourg economy is on the financial sector.