Measuring Aggregate Welfare in Developing Countries: How Well do National Accounts and Surveys Agree?

In a data set for developing, and transition economies, the author finds that private consumption per capita, based on national accounts, deviates on average from mean household income, or expenditure based on national sample surveys. Growth rates also differ systematically, so that the ratio of the survey mean to the national accounts mean, tends to fall over time. But there are revealing exceptions to these general findings. The aggregate difference in the levels is due more to income surveys, than to expenditure surveys. And there are strong regional effects; for example, the severe data problems in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, means that there is negligible correlation in that region, between growth rates from national accounts, and those from household surveys.

[1]  D. Slesnick.  Are Our Data Relevant to the Theory? The Case of Aggregate Consumption , 1998 .

[2]  Robert Fildes,et al.  Journal of business and economic statistics 5: Garcia-Ferrer, A. et al., Macroeconomic forecasting using pooled international data, (1987), 53-67 , 1988 .

[3]  R. Langeheine,et al.  The Estimation Of Poverty Dynamics Using Different Measurements Of Household Income , 1998 .

[4]  K. Schmidt-Hebbel.  Saving across the world : puzzles and policies , 1997 .

[5]  M. Ravallion,et al.  RISK AND INSURANCE IN VILLAGE INDIA: COMMENT , 1997 .

[6]  T. Srinivasan.  Growth, poverty reduction, and inequality , 2000 .

[7]  M. Ravallion,et al.  Growth and redistribution components of changes in poverty measures: A decomposition with applications to Brazil and India in the 1980s , 1992 .

[8]  J. Triplett.  Measuring consumption: the post-1973 slowdown and the research issues , 1997 .

[9]  A. Deaton.  The Analysis of Household Surveys : A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy , 1997 .

[10]  N. Kakwani,et al.  POVERTY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH WITH APPLICATION TO CÔTE D'IVOIRE , 1993 .

[11]  Robert M. Townsend,et al.  Risk and Insurance in Village India , 1994 .

[12]  Marianne A. Hilgert,et al.  What ’ s Behind the Inequality We Measure : An Investigation Using Latin American Data , 2000 .

[13]  Shaohua Chen,et al.  What Can New Survey Data Tell Us About Recent Changes in Distribution and Poverty? , 1996 .

[14]  Shaohua Chen,et al.  How Did the World's Poorest Fare in the 1990s? , 1999 .

[15]  Heinrich Lützel,et al.  Household Sector Income, Consumption, and Wealth , 1996 .

[16]  Adriaan M. Bloem,et al.  NATIONAL ACCOUNTS IN TRANSITION COUNTRIES: BALANCING THE BIASES? , 1998 .

[17]  Margaret Grosh,et al.  Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries , 2000 .

[18]  A. Maddison,et al.  Chinese economic performance in the long run , 1998 .

[19]  D. Slesnick.  Consumption and Social Welfare: Introduction , 2000 .

[20]  Harry X. Wu.  China's GDP Level and Growth Performance: Alternative Estimates and the Implications , 2000 .

[21]  Informal Economic Activity , 1992 .

[22]  Nancy D. Ruggles,et al.  The Integration Of Macro And Micro Data For The Household Sector1 , 1986 .