Proposal Description

There is a strong need for more timely, consistent and high-quality information on how different household groups in society are faring. Shocks such as the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have stressed the importance of having better information on distributions across social groups, as key input to design policies and to foster inclusive growth. Distributional results on income, consumption and wealth aligned to important macroeconomic aggregates such as GDP, household disposable income and household net wealth are crucial in this regard, providing insight in key dimensions of material well-being across household groups. The growing demand for detailed distributional information is being addressed through the latest update of the System of National Accounts (SNA) and the G20 Data Gaps Initiative (DGI). The latter specifies that G20 economies should regularly publish distributional results in line with national accounts totals by the end of 2026.
This session will focus on the compilation of household distributional results in line with national accounts totals, providing an update on efforts within the international statistical community to develop harmonised methodology for the compilation of high-quality and internationally comparable results for a wide range of countries. Furthermore, it will include presentations on country experiences in compiling the relevant results, hearing both from more experienced countries as well as from countries that are relatively new to the work. The presentations will zoom in on the methodology and elaborate how to deal with specific methodological or practical challenges, while also showing some of the key results.

The session will start with an overview of international developments in the area of household distributional results, zooming in on work done by the relevant international expert groups and on the next steps for the work in view of the SNA update and the G20 Data Gaps Initiative. This will be followed by presentations in which countries share their experiences in compiling household distributional results, amongst others zooming in on the main data sources used, how they deal with any gaps between the micro and macro data, how they link data across different data sources, and also showcasing some of their results. Furthermore, it will zoom in on some specific topics that may pose challenges in the compilation of household distributional results in line with national accounts totals, such as compiling joint distributions on income, consumption and wealth, and accounting for pension wealth.
Presentations include an overview of international developments in area of household distributional results; experiences in compiling household distributional results in Belgium, Banca d'Italia, and Armenia; and accounting for pension wealth in household distributional wealth results. Presentations will highlight both data and methodological issues in blending data sets to produce microlevel statistics consistent with macroeconomic aggregrates.