Standard Error Estimation for EU-SILC target indicators – First Results of the Net-SILC2 Project

We present the first results of the Net-SILC2 project with regard to standard error estimation in EU-SILC (EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions). EU-SILC is the main data source for comparative analysis and indicators on income and living conditions in the European Union (EU), covering all the 27 EU countries and a number of other European countries. The growing complexity of EU-SILC, the widening of the user community and the increasing reliance on EU-SILC for policy targeting and evaluation have enhanced the need for comparable, accurate as well as workable solutions to the estimation of standard errors and confidence intervals for the indicators based on the EU-SILC surveys. After presenting the Net-SILC2 project and the recommended variance estimators, we show preliminary estimates of standard error and confidence intervals for cross-sectional measures, longitudinal measures and measures of changes between two waves. The proposed approach is general and can be implemented with multistage surveys. As far as variance of change is concerned, the proposed approach can be used with rotating longitudinal surveys (Kalton 2009) such as Labour Force Surveys