Household Budget Survey (1999)

The Household Budget Survey records all residing household expenditures to purchase goods and services to meet their needs; it is the main data source to describe, analyze and explain household spending behaviors. The survey allows analyzing the evolution of the household expenditure level and composition, according to household socio-demographic characteristics.

Households are selected at the beginning of yearly cycle by registry list in the sample district. The survey is conducted through two different techniques: a self-consumption diary, in which the household records purchases over a seven-day period, and a final face-to-face interview. In the reference week, households daily take note about purchase of large consumption goods using a questionnaire named “Purchase Diary”. If households produce goods by themselves, they take note in another diary called “Self-consumption Diary”. At the beginning of the next month, a final face-to-face interview is arranged by ISTAT.

According to the sample design, each year approximately 28,000 households are interviewed. The survey refers to the total cost of the goods or services purchased, apart from the moment of consumption or the payment instruments.

The main topic of this survey are as follows:

• socio-demographic characteristics
• dwelling characteristics
  • main dwelling (characteristics, services, tenure status, expenditures, maintenance)
  • secondary dwelling (expenditures, maintenance)
  • durable goods
• furniture and equipments purchase
  • indoor and garden furniture
  • small equipments and home accessories
• clothing and footwear
• health
• public transportation and communication
  • means of transport
  • communication devices
• leisure time, culture and education
  • leisure time
  • culture
  • education
  • holidays
• other services
  • personal belongings, not classified otherwise
  • recurring and extraordinary expenditures
• spending habits
• salary and savings
• purchase diary
• self-consumption diary

There’s a cross-section “Salary and savings” where information about components income, wage earners, medium income of households and yearly savings are collected. Every item of expenditure reported in the dataset refers to a period of one month. Istat uses the survey for the determination of the relative poverty.

In order to optimize the time of use of the dataset (exclusively distributed from ISTAT for not member users), UniData offers a service of convertion from ASCII format to the main statistical software format (SPSS, Stata, R or SAS). For detailed information visit the Services for Istat Data page.

Keywords: consumptions, economy, family, house, income, poverty