Harmonization of the budget and income surveys

Decoster, A., De Swerdt, K., Loughrey, J., O’Donoghue, C., and Verwerft, D. (2008), Harmonization of the budget and income surveys, Workpackage 3.2 of Accurate Income Measurement for the Assessment of Public Policies (AIM-AP Contract no 028412), Leuven.
ABSTRACT

This paper constitutes the second deliverable of project 3 of the AIM-AP project (Contract no 028412). The content of this paper describes the datasets that will be used for the actual imputation of expenditures into the EUROMOD income datasets in Workpackage 3.5. In particular, a comparison is made between the matching variables in the budget and income dataset for each country in order to ensure that these common variables have the same meaning in both datasets. To that end, a distributional analysis will be performed. Finally, the comparability between countries, especially concerning the disposable income concept and the harmonisation of expenditure variables, is discussed.