Expert group on disparities in a national accounts framework : results from the 2015 exercise

In 2011, an Expert Group was launched to carry out a feasibility study on the compilation of distributional measures of income, consumption and wealth across household groups consistent with national accounts data. This group developed a methodology on the basis of which first experimental results on income, consumption and savings according to income quintiles were compiled and published in 2013. In 2015, the expert group engaged in a second exercise focusing on a more recent year and taking into account a number of adjustments to the methodology used in the previous exercise. This paper describes the sources, methods and results of this second exercise. The results of the exercise show that in general all countries are able to comply with the methodology. Furthermore, countries have micro data available for most of the national accounts items and in case of lacking data, imputations lead to comparable results. However, the results also show that in some cases gaps between the micro aggregates and the national accounts totals are quite substantial, possibly affecting the overall distributional results. Furthermore, more information is needed on how countries link data across various data sources. The experimental results show that Mexico records the highest income and consumption disparities, followed by the United States and Portugal, and that Slovenia records the lowest. The paper also shows that breakdowns into other household groups, such as age group and labour market status reveal very interesting information.