Page 105 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS102 Sigita G. et al.

Income, consumption and wealth data
integration - a household perspective
Friderike Oehler, Sigita Grundiza, Francesca Tartamella
European Commission, Eurostat, Luxembourg

Abstract
Disparities in income, consumption and wealth (ICW) are increasingly
analysed, not only by the research community and international organisations
but also by the public. The joint distribution of income, consumption and
wealth data provides links between the three economic dimensions. These
data help to describe more thoroughly material well-being and households'
economic vulnerability. Income and consumption aggregates drawn from
national accounts (macro-level data) describe the situation of households as
an institutional unit in the macroeconomic context. Income distribution (from
the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, EU-SILC) and
consumption data (from the Household Budget Survey), on the other hand,
are based on micro-level data and used to measure inequalities in the context
of social policies. Eurostat has been working on the two work streams of the
ICW project: The joint distribution of ICW (based on household surveys) and
micro (survey statistics) –macro (national account) data links for households'
ICW. Differing concepts and data collection practices mean that the analysis
of these different sources do not necessarily lead to the same conclusions as
regards people’s prosperity. The work has been done in close cooperation with
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and European
Central Bank.
The paper describes the methods and results of the ICW project. The random
hot-deck method was used for the statistical matching of ICW data from the
surveys. By comparing micro- and macro-level statistics on households, we
can understand their complementarities and differences and build robust links
between the data sources.

Keywords
Households perspective; households' surveys; distribution of national
accounts; statistical matching

1. Introduction
The European Commission has stressed the need to bring social indicators
on a par with the EU reinforced macroeconomic governance. A key part of the
strategy is the availability of harmonised statistics at EU level covering the

94 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9