Estimating household distributions on a System of Macroeconomic Accounts basis

In order to produce distributional information aligned with the System of Macroeconomic Accounts (MEA) concepts, Statistics Canada follows the basic steps recommended by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Expert Group on Disparities within the National Accounts. These steps are outlined in figure 1 below.

Figure 1

Description for Figure 1

Step 1: Adjust national account totals. Step 2: Determine relevant variables from micro sources in relation to the national accounts variables. Step 3: Impute for missing elements and scale the micro data to the adjusted national accounts totals. Step 4: Cluster households. Step 5: Derive relevant indicators for the household groups.

This approach is followed as a general framework, since some steps are not required in the case of Statistics Canada’s MEA. For example, step 1 recommends isolating the household sector for distributional analysis, which may require adjusting the MEA sector total if it has been aggregated with the non-profit institutions serving households (NPISH) sector. Since the Canadian MEA adopted the System of National Accounts (SNA) 2008 institutional sectoring detail throughout the sequence of integrated accounts with the 2012 comprehensive revision, no such adjustment is necessary for the MEA household sector totals.

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