Polish Household Panel 1987-1990 as PACO Dataset

For a few years now, a research group of our Department (hereafter referred to as the Group) has been studying Household Budget Surveys (HBS) conducted annually by the Central Statistical Office (CSO) in Poland. In that time, the Group cooperated with the Luxembourg Income Study from Luxembourg. This collaboration resulted in joining the PACO Project in 1995. This presentation sums up the work on adjusting Polish panel data (1987-90) to the PACO standard, which was carried out between September 1995 and June 1996 mainly by Brunon Gorecki, Marek Peczkowski and Andrzej Grodner. We would like to express our acknowledgement to the CSO for providing us with the data and methodological support. The accomplishment of the project was possible thanks to two visits in Luxembourg (two-weeks each), where Marek and Andrzej met with friendliness and patience of CEPS/INSTEAD representatives. Moreover, mention should be made here of contributions made by Marian Wisniewski and Irena Topinska (members of the Group), Andrzej Ochocki - Director of the CSO Household Department and other CSO specialists, who participated in preliminary meetings concerning clarification of definitions for basic economic terms and economic categories used in HBS. Since 1982, till 1992 the Central Statistical Office of Poland used the same method of surveying household budgets. The method was based on quarterly rotation of households in the yearly cycle. The sampling was done once for four years period. Annually, there were surveyed two groups of households. One of them should remain in the survey for four years (2/3 of sample) while another one was replaced every year with new families (1/3 of sample).These sampling features enable to extract 2 from data sets collected for four consecutive years these same households surveyed through the whole four year period. They were candidates for a panel. However, panel study has never been of prime interest for the Central Statistical Office, and for this reason such a panel was never constructed and analyzed in CSO. This job was done at the Department of Economics, Warsaw University.