A Detailed Presentation of the Households Sector in the SNA: Microdata Usage Opportunities

The article discusses the use of microdata in the transition to a detailed representation of the households sector in the System of National Accounts (SNA), in accordance with the objectives of developing methods for measuring well-being at the macroeconomic level. Implementing distributed macroeconomic indicators of household income, expenses, and savings in the core sequence of national accounts allows for a more complete picture of intersectoral cooperation in the national economy. However, it largely depends on the completeness and methodological compatibility of microeconomic and macroeconomic statistical indicators.

The first part of the paper examines the problems of using data from various surveys to evaluate income, expenditure, and savings indicators distributed by income groups. It proposes compiling harmonized sets of detailed information for the construction of distributive information based on the statistical integration of microdata from several sources. This allows the formation of the so-called synthetic sets of microdata with additional characteristics without the need for additional surveys.

One example of such data harmonization is the statistical integration of the results of two Rosstat surveys – Sample Observation of Income of Population and Participation in Social Programs (SOIP) and Households Budget Sample Survey (HBS). Since the SOIP data are used to calculate the Gini coefficient, which characterizes income inequality, they were accepted as the primary data set, while the HBS served as a donor (source) of information on final consumption expenditures. The second part of the paper presents an algorithm for the statistical integration of two surveys to obtain a set of microdata characterizing household incomes and expenditures.

In the third part of the paper, the income and expenditure balances of each quintile group of households are presented and compiled by the authors following the methodology of the System of National Accounts using microeconomic data obtained during sample surveys conducted by Rosstat. The estimated distributed indicators of household income and expenses are integrated into the experimental social accounts matrix (SAM) for the Russian Federation for 2020. This made it possible to combine flows between subsectors (quintile groups) of the household sector and other institutional sectors of the economy in a single macroeconomic model. This approach significantly increases the analytical value of the SAM.

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