A quality assessment of flash estimates for the income distribution

Authors

Aura Leulescu, Daniel Koch, Bogdan Micu, Cristina Lopez-Vilaplana

Publication Date

May 2016

Summary

EU-SILC indicators on poverty and income inequalities are an important part of the toolkit for the European Semester which is the yearly cycle of economic policy coordination among EU member states. However, income year N is only available in the autumn N+2 which comes too late for the policy agenda. In order to be able to provide earlier information, one approach pursued in Eurostat is the development of flash estimates of the income distribution. Several strands are investigated including: re-weighting procedures and modelling techniques in order to account for demographic and labour market changes captured in more timely sources such as LFS, and the use of the microsimulation models that replicate at individual/household level the effects of the different taxation regimes. The flash estimates are therefore model-based and rely on micro-data. The quality framework is based on an (1) ex-ante quality assurance via consistency analysis of auxiliary data sources and intermediary quality checks and (2) a quality assessment via back-testing (measuring the model's ability to forecast the past) supplemented by the development of a quality

Publication type

Conference Paper

Research areas

Population changes and labour market dynamics, Tax and benefit systems

Links

http://www.ine.es/q2016/docs/q2016Final00290.pdf

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