The availability of microdata on both income and expenditure is highly recommended if one wants to assess the distributional consequences of policy changes. In Italy, the main sources used for estimating household income and expenditure are the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and...

The EU's Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), launched in 2003, was the first micro-level data set to provide comprehensive data on incomes and other social and economic domains over the enlarged EU. This paper draws on two programmes of research to ask how well the EU-SILC has...