© European Survey Research Association Robust Small Area Estimation and Oversampling in the Estimation of Poverty Indicators

There has been rising interest in research on poverty mapping over the last decade, with the Eu-ropean Union proposing a core of statistical indicators on poverty commonly known as Laeken Indicators. They include the incidence and the intensity of poverty for a set of domains (e.g. young people, unemployed people). The EU-SILC (European Union – Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) survey represents the most important source of information to estimate these poverty indicators at national or regional level (NUTS 1-2 level). However, local policy makers also require statistics on poverty and living conditions at lower geographical/domain levels, but estimating poverty indicators directly from EU-SILC for these domains often leads to inaccurate estimates. To overcome this problem there are two main strategies: i. increasing the sample size of EU-SILC so that direct estimates become reliable and ii. resort to small area estimation techniques. In this paper we compare these two alternatives: with the availability of an oversampling of the EU-SILC survey for the province of Pisa, obtained as a side result of the SAMPLE project (Small Area Methods for Poverty and Living Conditions