The relationship between income, consumption and wealth: Methods and results of a first experimental integration of multiple households surveys in Italy

The availability of multidimensional indicators on household economic resources is an indispensable policy tool for the fight against poverty and inequality. In this article, we describe the efforts done by Istat and Bank of Italy to integrate through statistical matching techniques the data of Istat “EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions - EU-SILC” and “Household Budget Survey - HBS”, and the Bank of Italy “Survey on Household Income and Wealth - SHIW”. The final objective consists in producing microdata that serve as basis for studying the relationship between income, consumption and wealth (ICW) of households in Italy. The Istat's approach to statistical matching takes EU-SILC as the reference survey and imputes in it at first consumption expenditure and then net wealth. This choice is the outcome of a series of exercises ending with different estimated experimental ICW distributions and comparing them with those obtained by the Bank of Italy in a separate statistical matching exercise, which instead used SHIW as the reference file. This new approach, through sensitivity analysis, robustness checks, and an analysis of the uncertainty resulting from matching, provides a reference framework for assessing the quality of the final ICW estimates.