Administrative and Survey data Collection and Integration

The increasing number of data sources made available from public and private companies poses new challenges in the production of statistics. The idea is essentially that of satisfying the demand for accurate and timely statistics without setting up a new survey, but trying to exploit all the information made available by the data sources at hand. The integration of different data sources can have different objectives, according to the characteristics of the available data sources. This chapter aims at stressing the relevance of integration for two different objectives: (i) when the purpose is to build better measures of economic well-being at the macro level; or (ii) when the purpose is to give proper statistics to local government in order to address policies, in fact, neither sample surveys, nor a single administrative register can generally provide broad and accurate indicators at a detailed geographical level.