The use of registers in the context of EU?SILC: challenges and opportunities.

Most Member States have been moving or intend to move towards an increased use of administrative data for statistical purposes. This Working Paper discusses the use of registers data in combination with interviews data in household sample surveys, with special reference to the EU-SILC. Despite some disadvantages, the Working Paper concludes that for both cost and quality reasons, the way forward is to expand the use of registers in EU-SILC. In the short-run, the greatest potential gain may come from replacing survey questions on social benefits and employment income with valid register data in as many EU-SILC countries as possible. However, using registers can cause timeliness problems due to late data delivery by income data owners and due to extensive practices intended to ensure internal consistency. Also, the transition from survey data to administrative can have an impact on data comparability across time within a country and across countries. It may, in particular, cause breaks in data series and it involves risks for policy monitoring and for the assessment of progress made towards the national and EU social inclusion targets. The best approach should be sustainable in the long term, taking account of aspects of governance, flexibility of implementation and the necessary trade-offs with timeliness requirements for statistical results.