Consumer surveys and the EU statistics on income and living conditions: friends or foes?

Abstract

To assess the quality of life in its member states, the EU has introduced the statistics on income and living conditions (EU-SILC), purposed to quantify the poverty levels and social problems in individual countries. Although EU-SILC is quite valuable from a policy perspective, because of its annual frequency it is not able to fully capture the dynamics of turbulent changes in the social and economic dimensions of households' well-being. To counteract that, this paper aims to complement the EU-SILC project by consumer survey (CS) data for 11 new EU member states. To be specific, three temporal disaggregation methods are employed on three CS variables (concerning the financial situation of households) in order to obtain quarterly estimates of risk of poverty and social exclusion. The authors find that the Chow-Lin disaggregation technique convincingly outperforms the other two competing models (Fernandez and Litterman approach), yielding considerably accurate quarterly estimates of poverty risk.