Small Area Estimation: a Practitioner’s Appraisal

Demands of regional statistics combined with pressure to reduce costs and response burden have lead to great interest in Small Area Estimation. Both researchers and practitioners take part in a largely very successful development that still is moving rapidly. However, the National Statistical Institutes in Europe have been rather hesitant to implement SAE, partly because of the different tradition of SAE in terms of statistical inference. NSIs are obliged to as far as possible publish officials statistics that are based on estimators with negligible bias. Fear of model misspecification has been a hindrance to wide application of SAE. Use of a model is now seen as a quality issue. Communication of methods and the resulting quality of statistics is an issue that NSIs have recently given specific attention to.