Page 106 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS102 Sigita G. et al.
distributional aspects of households’ Income, Consumption and Wealth (ICW).
Eurostat has been working on the two work streams of the ICW project:
• The joint distribution of ICW (based on household surveys ).
1
2
• Micro (survey statistics) –macro (national accounts) data links for
3
households' income and consumption .
This paper will cover the methodology and experimental results of both
work strands.

2. Methodology
2.1. Micro-Macro links for income and consumption
Differing concepts and data collection practices between national
accounts and social surveys mean that these different sources do not
necessarily lead to the same conclusions as regards people’s prosperity. In
2018 Eurostat published a new experimental statistics webpage “Income and
consumption: social surveys and national accounts”. It includes a conceptual
and numerical comparison of income and consumption indicators between
social surveys and national accounts as regards household income and
consumption. This entails:
- analysing methodological concepts in data sources and quality of
underlying data, in order to create categories of income and
consumption that are similar in both data sources,
- estimate the total of income and consumption for these categories (using
the categorisation established for each data source),
- calculate the data gaps between these categories,
- distribute the data gap (results are not yet published by Eurostat) to
derive distributional indicators derived from surveys and benchmarked
to national accounts totals.
With regard to the latter, the choice of the method for distributing the gap
can significantly impact the results. According to Zwijnenburg J. (2016), the
main reasons for data gaps are the quality of micro data used to derive
distributions (including measurement and estimation errors), the quality of
macro data, the methodological consistency between micro and macro data
sources, the quality of the adjustments to the national accounts totals and the
correction for the underground economy and illegal activities. The soundness
of the distributional results needs to be complemented by metadata. This
should reflect the quality of input, consistency of concepts and actual data

1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/experimental-statistics/income-consumption-and-wealth
2 Income- EU-SILC (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions); consumption
– HBS (Household Budget Survey); wealth – HFCS (Household Finance and Consumption
survey, ECB)
3 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/experimental-statistics/ic-social-surveys-and-national-
accounts
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