Publication
The Korean Economic Forum
Problems and Corrections of the Household Income and Expenditure Survey
Nak Nyeon Kim (Dongguk University)Year 2022Vol. 15No. 1
Abstract
Since the Household Income and Expenditure Survey is designed as rotation
sampling in which a certain percentage of the sample is replaced every month,
the number of months each sample is surveyed in a year spans 1-12 months
(1-6 months after 2020). Statistics Korea calculates quarterly or annual statistics
by simply averaging the survey results for the month from monthly data. This
is fine for items with similar recurring monthly expenditures, but distortion
occurs for items that do not. Depending on the number of months surveyed and
the frequency of purchase of items, the annual statistics tend to be exaggerated
by up to 12 times (three times in the case of quarterly statistics) than the actual
ones, while items not purchased in the survey month are completely omitted
from the survey. When calculating the overall average, it was found that such
overestimation and underestimation due to omission offset each other. However,
the average per household is not, so the consumption gap between households
is wider than it really is, and the distortion has grown bigger in recent years.
In this paper, the bias of items consumed by each household included in the
annual data for 2015-16 and 2019-20 was corrected in a reasonable way, and the
results were compared with the existing micro data.