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IPS102 Peter V. et al.
or not including non-profit institutions serving households (NPISHs), are
“adjusted” to exclude items that do not concern private households
resident in a country, such as NPISHs if combined with results of the
household sector, and the income and consumption of institutional
households. In the second step, at the most detailed level of available
transaction and consumption categories, micro variables are identified
that best match the various national accounts items. Different data sources
may be selected in this step, depending on which sources provide the best
link for the various income and consumption items. In the third step, the
micro data are scaled to match the “adjusted” national accounts totals
from step 1. Furthermore, imputations are made for items that typically fall
outside the scope of micro data. This may relate to items that are specific
to the system of national accounts (e.g., imputed items such as financial
intermediation services indirectly measured (FISIM), investment income
disbursements, and social transfers in kind), but also to items that are likely
to be underreported or completely missing from the micro data (e.g.,
income from the underground economy and illegal activities). Finally,
households are clustered into the various household groupings
distinguished, and results are derived for the main aggregates and
distributional measures.

Figure 1: Step by step approach for the estimation of distributional information
Step 1 - Adjust national accounts totals

Step 2 - Determine relevant variables from micro data sources in
relation to the national accounts variables

Step 3 - Impute for missing elements and scale the micro data to the
adjusted national accounts totals

Step 4 - Clustering households

Step 5 - Derive relevant indicators for the household groups

10. Some countries have already started to publish distributional results
on the basis of the methodology developed by the EG DNA (Australia,
Canada, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovenia and the United
Kingdom). In the meantime, the expert group continues to work on further
improvements in order to arrive at a more robust methodology thus
motivating more countries to publish results. In this respect, apart from
deciding on the methodology to allocate social transfers in kind to

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