Expenditure and Consumption Survey, 2007
West Bank and Gaza, 2007 - 2008
Identification
WBG_2007_PECS_v01_M
Expenditure and Consumption Survey, 2007
| Name | Country code |
|---|---|
| West Bank and Gaza | WBG |
Income/Expenditure/Household Survey [hh/ies]
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) conducted a household expenditure and consumption survey for the first time between 1/10/1995 and 30/9/1996.
PCBS then conducted a series of surveys on the following dates:
- A second survey between 1/1/1997 and 31/1/1997.
- A third survey between 1/1/1998 and 31/1/1998.
- A fourth survey between 15/3/2001 and 14/3/2002.
- A fifth survey between 15/1/2004 and 14/1/2005.
- A sixth survey between 15/1/2005 and 14/1/2006.
- A seventh survey between 15/1/2006 and 14/1/2007.
- And an eighth survey between 15/1/2007 and 14/1/2008.
The findings of these surveys constituted a solid database and enabled PCBS to publish detailed statistics on expenditure and consumption.
The basic goal of this survey is to provide the necessary database for formulating national policies at various levels. It represents the contribution of the household sector to the Gross National Product (GNP). Household Surveys help as well in determining the incidence of poverty, and providing weighted data which reflects the relative importance of the consumption items to be employed in determining the benchmark for rates and prices of items and services.
Generally, the Household Expenditure and Consumption Survey is a fundamental cornerstone in the process of studying the nutritional status in the Palestinian territory.
The raw survey data provided by the Statistical Office was cleaned and harmonized by the Economic Research Forum, in the context of a major research project to develop and expand knowledge on equity and inequality in the Arab region.
The main focus of the project is to measure the magnitude and direction of change in inequality and to understand the complex contributing social, political and economic forces influencing its levels. However, the measurement and analysis of the magnitude and direction of change in this inequality cannot be consistently carried out without harmonized and comparable micro-level data on income and expenditures.
Therefore, one important component of this research project is securing and harmonizing household surveys from as many countries in the region as possible, adhering to international statistics on household living standards distribution. Once the dataset has been compiled, the Economic Research Forum makes it available, subject to confidentiality agreements, to all researchers and institutions concerned with data collection and issues of inequality.
Data is a public good, in the interest of the region, and it is consistent with the Economic Research Forum's mandate to make micro data available, aiding regional research on this important topic.
Sample survey data [ssd]
1- Household/families.
2- Individuals.
Version
V1.0: A cleaned and a harmonized version of the survey dataset, produced by the Economic Research Forum for dissemination.
2012-11
All documentation available for the original survey, whether provided by the Statistical Office or generated by the Economic Research Forum, has been published. However, as far as the datasets are concerned, the Economic Research Forum produces and releases only the harmonized versions in both SPSS and STATA formats.
Scope
Household: Includes geographic, social, and economic characteristics of households, namely, household composition, dwelling characteristics, ownership of assets indicators, heads' and spouses' characteristics, annual household expenditure and income.
Individual: Includes demographic, education, labor and health characteristics, as well as annual income for household members identified as earners.
Fathers' and mothers' characteristics are generated for household members if possible.
| Topic | Vocabulary |
|---|---|
| Poverty | ERF |
| Expenditure | ERF |
| Income | ERF |
| Infrastructure | ERF |
| Education | ERF |
| Labor | ERF |
| Health | ERF |
Coverage
The survey data covers urban, rural and camp areas in West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The survey covered all the Palestinian households who are a usual residence in the Palestinian Territory.
Producers and sponsors
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics | Palestinian National Authority |
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| The Palestinian National Authority | Financial assistance |
| The Core Funding Group | Financial assistance |
| Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation | Financial assistance |
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Palestinian Households | responded to the survey instrument |
Sampling
Sample and Frame:
The sampling frame consists of all enumeration areas which enumerated in 1997 and the numeration area consists of buildings and housing units and has in average about 150 households in it. We use the enumeration areas as primary sampling units PSUs in the first stage of the sampling selection. The enumeration areas of the master sample were updated in 2003.
Sample Design:
The sample is stratified cluster systematic random sample with two stages:
First stage: selection a systematic random sample of 120 enumeration areas.
Second stage: selection a systematic random sample of 12-18 households from each enumeration area selected in the first stage.
Sample strata:
The population is divided by:
1-Region (North West Bank, Middle West Bank, South West Bank, Gaza Strip)
2-Type of Locality (urban, rural, refugee camps)
Target cluster size:
The target cluster size or "sample-take" is the average number of households to be selected per PSU. In this survey, the sample take is around 12 households.
Sample Size:
The calculated sample size is 1,714 households, the completed households were 1,231 (812 in the west bank and 419 in the Gaza strip).
The survey sample consists of about 1,714 households interviewed over a twelve months period between (January 2007-January 2008).1,231 households completed the interview, of which 812 were from the West Bank and 419 households in Gaza Strip; the response rate was 71.8% in the Palestinian Territory.
First, the primary weight for the household in a certain startum was calculated by dividing the number of households in the stratum on the sample size of households in the same stratum.
Then the weights for the respondents were adjusted to compensate for the non response of households by calculating the factor of weights adjustment through dividing the sample size of households from a certain stratum on the number of the respondent in the households from tha same stratum.
The final weight for the households is therefore a multiplication of the factor of the weights adjustment by the primary weights for the household.
Survey instrument
The PECS questionnaire consists of two main sections:
First section:
Certain articles / provisions of the form filled at the beginning of the month, and the remainder filled out at the end of the month. The questionnaire includes the following provisions:
Cover sheet: It contains detailed and particulars of the family, date of visit, particular of the field/office work team, number/sex of the family members.
Statement of the family members: Contains social, economic and demographic particulars of the selected family.
Statement of the long-lasting commodities and income generation activities:
Includes a number of basic and indispensable items (i.e., Livestock, or agricultural lands).
Housing Characteristics: Includes information and data pertaining to the housing conditions, including type of shelter, number of rooms, ownership, rent, water, electricity supply, connection to the sewer system, source of cooking and heating fuel, and remoteness/proximity of the house to education and health facilities.
Monthly and Annual Income: Data pertaining to the income of the family is collected from different sources at the end of the registration / recording period.
Assistance and poverty: includes questions about household conditions and assistances that got through the the past month.
Second section:
The second section of the questionnaire includes a list of 55 consumption and expenditure groups itemized and serially numbered according to its importance to the family. Each of these groups contains important commodities. The number of commodities items in each for all groups stood at 667 commodities and services items. Groups 1-21 include food, drink, and cigarettes. Group 22 includes homemade commodities. Groups 23-45 include all items except for food, drink and cigarettes. Groups 50-55 include all of the long-lasting commodities. Data on each of these groups was collected over different intervals of time so as to reflect expenditure over a period of one full year, except the cars group the data of which was collected for three previous years.
These data was abotained from the recording book which is covered a period of month for each household.
Data collection
| Start | End | Cycle |
|---|---|---|
| 2007-01-15 | 2008-01-15 | Annual |
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics | Palestinian National Authority |
Four teams of female interviewers, three in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip carried out data collection. Each team consisted of a supervisor, a field editor, and 1-2 interviewers. Fieldwork teams were distributed to different districts according to sample allocation.
All field staff received a training session combining general theoretical and practical components. Interviewers, supervisors and editors for the survey were selected from those who worked on the previous rounds of PECS Surveys. Fieldwork procedures and organization were designed to ensure adequate supervision and the collection of high quality data. To this end, several quality control measures were used throughout fieldwork. An interviewer undertook between 120 and 150 household visits in a month. The households were asked to keep daily records in a diary during their recording month. The interviewer transferred the records in a questionnaire on a weekly basis. Data on durable goods were captured by the recall method for the last 12 months (rounds), in order to avoid large variance in estimates when the one-month approach is used.
Data processing
Raw Data
Data editing took place through a number of stages, including:
- Office editing and coding
- Data entry
- Structure checking and completeness
- Structural checking of SPSS data files
Harmonized Data
- The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) is used to clean and harmonize the datasets.
- The harmonization process starts with cleaning all raw data files received from the Statistical Office.
- Cleaned data files are then all merged to produce one data file on the individual level containing all variables subject to harmonization.
- A country-specific program is generated for each dataset to generate/compute/recode/rename/format/label harmonized variables.
- A post-harmonization cleaning process is run on the data.
- Harmonized data is saved on the household as well as the individual level, in SPSS and converted to STATA format.
Data appraisal
The calculations of standard errors for the main survey estimates enable the user to identify the accuracy of estimates and the survey reliability.
Total errors of the survey can be divided into two kinds: statistical errors, and non-statistical errors.
Non-statistical errors are related to the procedures of statistical work at different stages, such as the failure to explain questions in the questionnaire, unwillingness or inability to provide correct responses, bad statistical coverage, etc. These errors depend on the nature of the work, training, supervision, and conducting of all the various related activities.
The work team spared no effort at the different stages to minimize non-statistical errors; however, it is difficult to estimate numerically such errors due to absence of technical computation methods based on theoretical principles to tackle them.
On the other hand, statistical errors can be measured. Frequently they are measured by the standard error, which is the positive square root of the variance. The variance of this survey has been computed by using the "programming package" CENVAR
The impact of errors on the data quality was reduced to the minimal due to the high efficiency and outstanding selection, training, and performance of the fieldworkers.
Procedures adopted during the fieldwork of the survey were considered a necessity to ensure the collection of accurate data, notably:
- Develop schedules to conduct field visits to households during survey fieldwork. The objectives of the visits and the data that is collected on each visit were predetermined.
- Fieldwork editing rules were applied during the data collection to ensure corrections were implemented before the end of fieldwork activities
- Fieldworker were instructed to provide details in case of extreme expenditure or consumption of the household.
- Postpone the questions on income to the last visit at the end of the month
- Validation rules were embedded in the data processing systems along with procedures to verify data entry and data editing.
Data Access
| Name | Affiliation | URL | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Economic Research Forum | Economic Research Forum (ERF) | www.erf.org.eg | erfdataportal@erf.org.eg |
| Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics | Palestinian National Authority | www.pcbs.gov.ps | diwan@pcbs.gov.ps |
| Is signing of a confidentiality declaration required? | Confidentiality declaration text |
|---|---|
| yes | To access the micro-data, researchers are required to register on the ERF website and comply with the data access agreement. The data will be used only for scholarly, research, or educational purposes. Users are prohibited from using data acquired from the Economic Research Forum in the pursuit of any commercial or private ventures. |
Licensed datasets, accessible under conditions.
The users should cite the Economic Research Forum and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics as follows:
"Economic Research Forum and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestinian Consumption and Expenditure Survey 2007/2008 (PECS 2007/2008), Version 1.0 of the Licensed data files (March 2013), provided by the Economic Research Forum. http://www.erfdataportal.com/index.php/catalog"
Disclaimer and copyrights
The Economic Research Forum and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics have granted the researcher access to relevant data following exhaustive efforts to protect the confidentiality of individual data. The researcher is solely responsible for any analysis or conclusions drawn from available data.
(c) 2012, Economic Research Forum | (c) 2007, Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics
Contacts
| Name | URL | |
|---|---|---|
| Economic Research Forum (ERF) - 21 Al-Sad Al-Aaly St., Dokki, Giza, Egypt | erfdataportal@erf.org.eg | www.erf.org.eg |
Metadata production
DDI_WBG_2007_PECS_v01_M
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Economic Research Forum | Cleaning and Harmonizing raw data received from the Statistical Office |
2012-11
Metadata version
Version 1.0
DDI Number, Study ID and Country fields edited by World Bank Data Group (May 2013)