Canada

Canada’s Survey of Household Spending (SHS) collects detailed information on household spending and the annual income of household members. The survey is conducted every two years and data are collected on a continuous basis throughout the survey reference year. Participants can complete an online questionnaire to record regular expenditures on items such as rent and electricity and to record less-frequent expenditures on larger items such as furniture. For regular expenditures, the amount of the last payment and the period it covers are collected, whilst for larger expenditures the recall periods can vary, and include the last two weeks, or three and twelve months. The flexible use of recall periods builds on the approach taken by the United States of America, which is detailed below. The National Statistics Institutes in Canada and the United States of America worked together to determine how the findings from the Consumer Expenditure Survey in the United States could be applied to the SHS.

Participants are also asked to keep a paper-based expenditure diary for a specified period (one week for household members living in the provinces and for a two-week period for those living in territorial capitals). Respondents are asked to record all their expenditures, save for a few items including rent, utility payments and property and vehicle purchases. Where respondents provide receipts to Statistics Canada, these are scanned and assigned one of the available 650 expenditure classification codes.

Linking data from the SHS with data from the Canada Revenue Agency, enables Statistics Canada to produce estimates of household income. Respondents are asked for their consent prior to these the linking of these two sets of data and, in the event, individuals do not agree, estimates are imputed.

United States of America

Estimates of household expenditure are produced by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) through its Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES). As in Canada, the CES provides information on American households’ income and expenditures. The BLS publishes estimates of consumer expenditure twice a year. Data are reported by income levels and household characteristics and public-use microdata files are published to assist users and researchers seeking to analyse data in more depth.

The CES consists of two separate surveys: the Interview and the Diary survey. The Quarterly Interview Survey is designed to collect data on large and recurring expenditures that consumers can be expected to recall for a period of three months or longer such as rent and utilities, while the Diary Survey is designed to collect data on small, frequently purchased items including most food and clothing. The move from an annual recall to quarterly recall in the Interview survey, and the daily recording of expenditures in the Diary survey, have improved the timeliness of these data and allowed for more detailed information on spending patterns.

In February 2021 the BLS published a paper detailing its plans for the evaluation and use of alternative data in the CES. The factors driving the consideration of alternative data, include declining response rates, the length and complexity of the existing CES and increasing data collection costs.

The paper responded to the findings of a Committee on National Statistics report entitled Measuring What We Spend: Toward a New Consumer Expenditure Survey, which recommended that the BLS consider linking CES information to, for example, Internal Revenue Service data to create a robust picture of how households expenditures vary with income over time. The Committee also requested that “BLS should pursue a long-term research agenda that integrates new technology and administrative data sources as part of a continuous process improvement”.

In its paper, the BLS’s initial response to these requirements, has been to consider the different sources of administrative data that could be used in the CES, including administrative records held by government entities for program administration, regulation, or law enforcement, consolidated data from private sector organisations, such as credit card companies, and operational data from routine agency activities such as the Statistics of Income program of the Internal Revenue Service.

The paper develops to examine the statistical profile of these data sources including their relevance, timing, representativeness, access, and conceptual differences and to discuss their potential for linking these sources to complement or substitute CES data.