There is a large demand for household distributional information in line with national accounts totals, as it provides comprehensive, coherent and comparable results that are consistent with macroeconomic aggregates. For that reason, the OECD and Eurostat launched an expert group to develop distributional results on income, consumption and savings in line with national accounts aggregates, i.e. the Expert Group on Disparities in a National Accounts framework (EG DNA). This expert group developed methodology to compile distributional results in line with national accounts on the basis of available micro data sources, and engaged in a couple of exercises to compile experimental results. The most recent exercise was conducted in 2020 and these results have been made available in the public databases of the OECD and Eurostat as experimental statistics.

 

Get data

• Distributional results on household income, consumption and savings (OECD experimental statistics)
• Socio-demographic characteristics of the households and individuals included in the various income groups 

The databases include results provided by countries as part of the third exercise, as well as results compiled by Eurostat on the basis of a centralised approach. A complete list of the available countries and years from the two approaches can be found here.

 

Methodology

The data have been compiled on the basis of methodology as developed by the EG DNA, combining national accounts’ data with micro data sources on income, consumption and savings to arrive at the relevant results. The methodology proceeds in five steps:

1. removing any amounts from the national accounts’ results that do not relate to private households which constitute the target population for the distributional results;
2. identifying micro variables that can be linked to the relevant national account;
3. generating imputations for elements that may not be covered in micro data and to align the results to the national accounts totals as derived in step 1;
4. clustering households into household groups, e.g. on the basis of their disposable income or socio-demographic characteristics; and
5. deriving distributional indicators based on the results for the household groupings derived in step 4.

More information on these steps can be found in the compilation guidelines. Furthermore, the collection template as used in the EG DNA work can be found here. 

Member countries of the EG DNA are compiling distributional results on the basis of various micro data sources available to their institution. In addition, Eurostat and the OECD have started to compile results for countries that are not participating in this work, utilising data sources available at the international level. Eurostat is focusing on EU countries, using EU-SILC and HBS data as input, and the OECD is focusing on non-EU OECD member countries, relying on data available from the Luxembourg Income Study. Results for EU countries are already available and have been included in the database. Results for non-EU countries are expected to become available in the course of 2021. More information on the Eurostat methodology, including results from sensitivity analyses accompanying the results, can be obtained here.

 

Further reading

OECD Statistics Working papers 

• Zwijnenburg, Jorrit, Sophie Bournot, David Grahn and Emmanuelle Guidetti (2021), “Expert Group on Disparities in a National Accounts Framework - Results from the third Exercise“, forthcoming.
• Zwijnenburg, Jorrit, Sophie Bournot and Federico Giovannelli (2017), “Expert Group on Disparities in a National Accounts Framework - Results from the 2015 Exercise", OECD Statistics Working Papers, No. 2016/10, OECD Publishing, Paris,  https://doi.org/10.1787/2daa921e-en.
• Fesseau, Maryse and Maria Liviana Mattonetti (2013), “Distributional Measures Across Household Groups in a National Accounts Framework - Results from an Experimental Cross-country Exercise on Household Income, Consumption and Saving”, OECD Statistics Working Papers, No. 2013/04, OECD Publishing, Paris, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k3wdjqr775f-en. 

National publications of distributional results in line with national accounts:

• Australia
• Canada
• France
  > Income and consumption: 2003 | 2011
  > Wealth: 2003 
• Netherlands 
• New Zealand 
• Slovenia 
• United Kingdom

 

Contact

For further information, contact egdna@oecd.org