Research project DB/DD/032 (Research action DB)
There are in Belgium several data bases containing socio-economic variables. Two of them are the NIS Survey on Household Budgets and the IPCAL data base containing the data of the Ministry of Finances. The Budget survey contains data on net income and expenditure per household. The IPCAL data base contains data on the taxable income per taxpayer. The aim is to construct a data base that integrates taxable income and expenditure data. This could be used in a micro-simulation model incorporating social security contributions as well as direct and indirect taxes.
This work can be done by recalculating the gross income data from the net incomes in the Budget survey. An alternative is to combine the Budget survey with the IPCAL data base. Since the latter method is preferred, it is necessary to solve the problem of equating fiscal units with family units. Another problem with this research is the under-estimation of expenditure and/or income in both data bases. Furthermore, the IPCAL data base has no data on the lowest stratum of income distribution and the Budget survey is only conducted quite sporadically. This raises the question, to be answered in this work: can these problems be solved by a new weighting of these observations?
The objective of all this processing is to propose flexibly applicable techniques. This implies repeating the exercise rapidly with other data bases, for instance that of the Panel Study of Belgian Households.
