1887

OECD Statistics Working Papers

The OECD Statistics Working Paper Series - managed by the OECD Statistics and Data Directorate – is designed to make available in a timely fashion and to a wider readership selected studies prepared by staff in the Secretariat or by outside consultants working on OECD projects. The papers included are of a technical, methodological or statistical policy nature and relate to statistical work relevant to the organisation. The Working Papers are generally available only in their original language - English or French - with a summary in the other.

Joint Working Papers:

Testing the evidence, how good are public sector responsiveness measures and how to improve them? (with OECD Public Governance Directorate)

Measuring Well-being and Progress in Countries at Different Stages of Development: Towards a More Universal Conceptual Framework (with OECD Development Centre)

Measuring and Assessing Job Quality: The OECD Job Quality Framework (with OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs)

Forecasting GDP during and after the Great Recession: A contest between small-scale bridge and large-scale dynamic factor models (with OECD Economics Directorate)

Decoupling of wages from productivity: Macro-level facts (with OECD Economics Directorate)

Which policies increase value for money in health care? (with OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs)

Compiling mineral and energy resource accounts according to the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) 2012 (with OECD Environment Directorate)

English

A Cross-country Comparison of Household Income, Consumption and Wealth between Micro Sources and National Accounts Aggregates

Much valuable information exists already on household economic resources (i.e. income, consumption and wealth). Indeed, the national accounts provide aggregate measures and micro sources (surveys, administrative records, and censuses) can be used to derive measures of the distribution across household groups. Over the years, however, macro and micro statisticians have tended to work separately leading to sometimes divergent results which can cause problem to users. In 2011, the OECD and Eurostat launched a joint Expert Group to carry out a study on the feasibility of compiling measures of the distribution of income, consumption and wealth across household groups that are consistent with national accounts definitions and totals. The first challenge of the Expert Group was to draw a detailed picture of the extent to which statistical information derived from micro sources can be aligned to three national accounts aggregates; 20 countries studied all (or part) of the components of adjusted disposable income, 21 all (or part) of the components of actual final consumption and 7 studied all (or part) of the components of household net worth. Results show that there are a number of identified reasons that can explain differences between micro and macro sources. Some of them were quantified and isolated showing finally that for most countries micro sources provide distributive information for most of the national accounts components but for some of them with quite significant gaps in total amounts. Overall, micro and macro totals are closer to each other for income components than for consumption and wealth components. The results also show that there is greater heterogeneity in results across countries for consumption components.

English

Keywords: health, consumption, income, household, national accounts, surveys
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