Household income aggregates in micro and macro statistics

Abstract

This article compares the data on wages and salaries, entrepreneurial income and property income obtained from Statistics Finland Income Distribution Survey 2000 with those on primary income from National Accounts. The international community of statisticians has in the past years been interested in this kind of analysis for twofold reasons. Firstly disaggregation or the linkage between micro and macro is an example of quality assessment by confronting alternate data sources. Secondly this kind of linkage increases policy relevance of National Accounts information.

Discrepancies due to differences in population coverage and definitions between the two statistics have been analysed in the article. Most of the discrepancies can be explained by these differences and only a quite marginal amount of the discrepancies are caused by measurement and sampling errors.