IASS Webinar 28: The Production of Microdata on Household Income, Consumption and Wealth at ISTAT: Experiences, Methods, Perspectives

Abstract:
Availability of joint micro data on income, consumption and wealth is fundamental to measure poverty and living conditions of households, overcoming the measures used up to now based on the observation of a single dimension (mainly income or consumption). The production of official statistics on the joint distribution of income, consumption and wealth at the micro level is an up-to-date priority for National Statistical Institutes as well as a key objective at the European level. The webinar will summarise the ISTAT experience for the production of micro-data on household income, consumption and wealth in Italy. It will present the actions taken in order to fill the gaps in term of data requirements and address the major methodological challenges in using statistical matching (SM) techniques. Specifically, we applied SM to European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), Household Budget Survey (HBS), both carried out by ISTAT, and to Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) of the Bank of Italy. The webinar will present the matching exercises to produce an integrated data set on household income and consumption and the deep process of an ex-ante harmonization of EU-SILC and HBS to fulfil those pre-conditions essential for data matching purposes. From the beginning, the work done was mainly directed on defining a sound methodological framework. We tested and applied the traditional statistical matching techniques (nonparametric imputation) and the more innovative methods based on the uncertainty analysis and on the matching of complex sample surveys (Renssen’s weights calibration approach). After the presentation of the main results of the consumption imputation, the problems associated with the imputation of household wealth collected in SHIW will be explained. This is an unprecedented and complex activity but that can benefit from the SM experience accumulated at ISTAT and from the cooperation project with the Bank of Italy to produce micro data on the joint distribution of income, consumption and wealth.