Estimation of household income based on asset ownership

Within the collaboration between Statistics Netherlands and the National Statistics Office of Georgia (GeoStat) a pilot study was carried out. The study aims the improvement of quality of the Integrated Household Survey (IHS) of GeoStat. One of the issues is that the income of the households obtained from the IHS is not reliable and not representative for the population. GeoStat does not have any administrative or other source with information on household income. In order to obtain information related to household income we developed an asset ownership questionnaire. The questionnaire was applied to a small group of households. Using a linear regression model based on this questionnaire we estimated the household income for the IHS data frame in the Tbilisi (Georgia) area. In this paper we recommend GeoStat to use these estimates for stratification of the IHS according to household income. The stratification can also be used for improving the weighting of the IHS and make the income distribution of households more representative. The pilot study was applied only on households in the Tbilisi area.