Abstract

Reliable information on the distribution of household wealth at a detailed geographical level is essential for understanding spatial inequalities, economic disparities and financial vulnerability. However, household wealth surveys are generally designed to provide reliable estimates at the national level and, to some extent, for broad geographical areas.
This presentation explores the potential of combining the microdata underlying the Distributional Wealth Accounts (DWA) with administrative information from cadastral records within a small area estimation (SAE) framework. DWA microdata provide a particularly valuable starting point for geographically disaggregated wealth estimation, as they incorporate adjustments for survey-related errors and are benchmarked to National Accounts aggregates. Administrative cadastral data, in turn, provide geographically detailed auxiliary information that can help overcome the limited territorial granularity of household surveys.
The work investigates how these complementary sources can be exploited within an SAE framework to produce reliable estimates of household wealth for geographical domains where direct survey estimates are too imprecise. The presentation will describe the estimation strategy, the integration of survey-based distributional information with geographically detailed administrative data, and the role of auxiliary information in improving local estimates. It will also discus the methodological challenges involved in translating nationally consistent wealth distributions into meaningful estimates at the local level.