INEbase / Household Budget Continuous Survey. Base 1997 / General methodology
Summary
Specific publications
General methodology
The Households Budget Continuous Survey, started by INE in the third quater of 1997, provides quarterly and annual information on the nature and end of the consumption expenditures, as well as on diverse characteristics respecting the way of living of households.
Consumption expenditures recorded in the Survey relate not only to the monetary flow that use the household and each one of its members to the payment of certain goods and services, considered as goods and services of final consumption, but also to the value of goods perceived for self-consumption, self-supply, wage in kind, free or discounted meals and rent imputed to the dwelling in which the household is living (when it is owner or has yielded it free or semi-free by other households or institutions)
Half of the sample (over 4,000 households) collaborates during one week per quarter, writing down during this period, in notebooks destined for it, all the goods and services they have paid for. However, being the week an excessively brief time interval to include the purchase of all the range of susceptible goods and services of consumption, is also asked for, by means of interviewing the totality of the sample (over 8,000 households), information on the purchases carried out with regularity larger than a week. The estimations provided in the Survey do not refer to civil quarters, since for certain goods and services are registered the payments made in the preceding quarter to the interview, which is variable for the different groups of households in which the sample is distributed in the quarter. Every quarter one eighth of the sample is renewed, so every household collaborates during a maximum of eight quarters.
The main criterion used to evaluate the expenditures in the new ECPF, base 1997, is the purchase, that is to say, they are recorded at the moment of availability of good or service by the household, independently of whether it has been paid in cash or not.
As a short-term indicator, the ECPF provides, in its advance results, estimations of the annual quarterly change of total and average expenditures by households.
The Survey gathers some variables of subjective perception whose provisional results are also published together with Advance series because of their short-term interest.
In order to deliver quickly the information of advance results, data of households submitted to a minimum manual debugging are used, which forces to take these results as provisional.
Data are put under an exhaustive debugging later, to obtain definitive results, in which it is provided information on the amount and evolution of expenditures, properly detached, according to different variables of classification.
Results are disseminated via three types of publications:
- Preview of results.
- Quarterly and annual results.
- Monographic studies.
Furthermore, microdata files are also available, filtered appropriately to ensure anonymity.
- Household Budget Survey. Base 1997. Methodology.
- Household Budget Survey. Base 1997. First results (3th and 4th quarter 1997) (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th quarter 1998 and annual 1998)
- Household Budget Continuous Survey. Base 1997. Definitive results.
(*) Only available in Spanish
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