This paper addresses respondents’ interpretation of the term “household expenditure” when answering survey questions. A sizeable minority of respondents do not attempt to include all transactions made by every household member, interpreting the question as eliciting individual consumption....

Sample surveys providing high quality information on both total household expenditure (consumption) and income are not commonly available. Nevertheless, surveys focusing on income usually do collect some information on expenditure data. A main drawback of this practice is that it could let some...

Variation in household survey design and implementation is used to obtain evidence of nonrandom measurement error in recall surveys of household expenditure. These surveys, which are used especially in developing countries, appear to have measurement errors in food expenditures and in food...