Abstract

Understanding the joint distribution of income and wealth is essential for analysing inequality and the transmission of economic shocks. This paper presents the first attempt to construct Italian distributional national accounts fully consistent with national accounts aggregates, building on the methodological framework developed by the European Central Bank. We combine microdata from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth with administrative fiscal records and apply component specific corrections for missing or misreported income sources. Additional adjustments include model-based imputation of rental income, asset specific returns for financial income, and the incorporation of synthetic high wealth households to address top tail undercoverage. Our results show that labour income is well measured in surveys, while entrepreneurial, rental, and especially financial income are severely underreported. After reconciliation, disposable income levels rise across the distribution, with the largest adjustments at the top. Income concentration increases substantially: the top decile receives around one third of total disposable income once capital income is fully accounted for. The joint distribution reveals strong but imperfect alignment between income and wealth, and pronounced differences in income composition across wealth groups. The reconciled framework offers a more robust basis for assessing inequality and the distributional impact of macroeconomic and fiscal policies in Italy.