Comparability of EU-SILC survey and register data: The relationship among employment, earnings and poverty

Abstract

The Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) provide an up-to-date data source for the comparative analysis of income, material deprivation and poverty. At the European Union (EU) level, these data have become a standard source for social reporting. Yet the specific approaches to data collection in EU-SILC vary widely from one country to the next. One of the major differences is that some countries rely entirely on household surveys, while others also use administrative or ‘register’ data for a wide range of variables. This article addresses the question of how the relationship among employment, earnings and poverty changes when different approaches to data collection are used. The article shows the impact on substantial results: here, on the percentages of working and non-working poor. Since crucial questions of EU social policy rest on these data, it is an important finding that some results are most likely driven by different approaches to data collection.

Hanging in, but only just: part-time employment and in-work poverty throughout the crisis

“…For a systematic discussion on the potential of EU-SILC data to examine the relationship between work and poverty, see Lohmann (2011). 3 The equivalence scale used is the OECD-modified scale (1 for the first adult, other adults correspond to 0.5 equivalent adult, and each child under 14 corresponds to 0.3 equivalent adults in terms of needs); the use of an equivalence scale is necessary in order to be able to compare households of various size and composition and to account for the economies of scale in multi-person households.…”

The Relationship Between EU Indicators of Persistent and Current Poverty

“…The data collection instrument may be partly responsible for this tendency (Lohmann 2011; Van Kerm and Pi Alperin 2010) but we are unable to be more conclusive because there are other features of these countries that may also be responsible for the poverty rate differences.…”

Measuring Income Polarization for Twenty European Countries, 2004–13: A Shapley Growth-Redistribution Decomposition

“…We follow the common practice (e.g. Lohmann, 2011) to exclude the non-positive disposable incomes. No top-coding of income has been applied.…”