The EU-SILC Framework regulation aims to establish “a common framework for the systematic production of European Union statistics on income and living conditions (hereafter referred to as EU-SILC), encompassing comparable and timely cross-sectional and longitudinal data on income and on the level and composition of poverty and social exclusion at national and European levels”.
Providing comparable data is a key objective of EU-SILC.
The common framework defines the harmonized lists of variables to be transmitted to Eurostat; common guidelines and procedures; common concepts (household and income) and classifications aimed at maximising comparability of the information produced . [1] Minimum standards apply to the data collected by the Member States.
However, compared to ECHP, Member States have a larger degree of flexibility in the choice of data sources and sampling design for EU-SILC. They are encouraged to build on existing national sources, whether these are registers (administrative data, for instance population registers or tax registers) or surveys (where information is collected by means of interviews). [2] The majority of countries use a survey design, where almost full information is obtained through interviews with household members. Germany uses self-administered questionnaires sent by post. In the so-called register countries (Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Slovenia, Iceland and Norway) most income components and some demographic information are obtained through administrative registers, and other personal variables are obtained through interview.
The flexibility of the framework is intended to promote the timely production of data. Given the time necessary to prepare the data to make them user-ready there is always a significant delay, typically two years, between the reference period (the period on which the data provide information) and the publication of results. Processing, validation and approval of these statistics is done by Eurostat in full collaboration with the participant countries.
[1] Eurostat metadata http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/living_conditions_and_social_protection/introduction/income_social_inclusion_living_conditions
[2] Eurostat. (2009). EU-SILC Doc.065 Description of target variables: Cross-sectional and Longitudinal. 2010 operation (Version October 2009) |
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