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STS441 Andrea N.

Linking household survey data and aggregate
statistics: The experience of Banca d’Italia
Andrea Neri
Banca d’Italia

Abstract
The financial crisis of 2008 and the following economic downturn have
increased demand for timely, coherent and consistent distributional
information for the household sector. The ideal approach to produce
distributional indicators is to combine the information coming from the
sample surveys with the one from national accounts. However, this is not an
easy task since these two data sources usually don’t provide coherent results.
In the paper, I discuss the experience of Banca d’Italia in trying to reconcile the
two sources of information and the methods used to compute distributional
indicators for the household sector.

Keywords
Distributional national accounts; micro-macro linkage; household wealth,
Pareto distribution, imputation methods

1. Introduction
The financial and economic crisis recently experienced by many European
countries have increased demand for timely, coherent and consistent
distributional information for the household sector.
The G20 data gap initiative has encouraged the production and
dissemination of distributional information on income, consumption, saving,
and wealth for the household sector. Eurostat and the European Statistical
System have agreed in the “Vienna Memorandum” in 2016 to work towards
the same objective as far as consumption, and income are concerned. In recent
years, also the measurement of household wealth is becoming increasingly
important for policy-making. This is especially the case in societies where job
insecurity is growing and where the welfare state is no longer able to ensures
acceptable living standards to all individuals. In these circumstances,
household wealth becomes an important buffer to guarantee an economic
wellbeing.
The measurement of household wealth is receiving high priority especially
in the agenda of national central banks (NCBs). In fact, most of the NCBs in
the in the Euro area, collect micro data on household finance and consumption
(Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey, HFCS). Banca
d’Italia conducts a wealth survey (SHIW, Survey on household income and

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