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.