Living Standards Survey 1985-1986, Wave 1 Panel

Data file: HHEXP85

Household Expenditure Aggregates

The survey data contain all necessary information for the construction of a complete set of current accounts for each household. Since income and expenditure data are available in great detail throughout the questionnaire permitting the calculation of detailed income and expenditure aggregates, this enables, theoretically, the derivation of savings as a residual.

Given the complexity and detail involved in the different income and expenditure modules, it is possible to build household income and expenditure aggregates in different ways, each of which are legitimate but which may provide considerably different results. Thus, various researchers have constructed their own Income and Expenditure Aggregates using CILSS data. However, only one set of researchers constructed a complete set of income and expenditure aggregates for all four years of the CILSS (85-88), along with their sub-aggregate components, namely the research project "Poverty and the Social Dimensions of Structural Adjustment in Côte d'Ivoire" (RPO 675-26). Oh and Venkataraman (1992) document in detail all of those income and expenditure aggregates and sub-aggregates. The documentation includes data set names, documentation of procedures used to `clean' the data, clear the data of outliers (including information on the percentage of observations classified as outliers), and the summation procedures used to build up variables in the questionnaire into sub-aggregate level variables and finally into aggregates.

Since this set of aggregates is also the only one which is accompanied by documentation, it is the only dataset of aggregates formally available for public use. However, users should be cautioned that these data are cleared of outliers and therefore, researchers who want the presence of outliers in their data in the belief that they are meaningful, may not find this set of aggregates suitable.

Total Household Expenditure = Food Expenditure + Consumption of Home-Produced Food +
Consumption of Home-Produced Non-Food Products + Other Expenditures + Paid Remittances + Wage Income in Kind