Developing Households' sub-sectors accounts: Pros and cons of the top-down and the bottom-up methods

The last decade debate on progress and well-being has stressed the necessity of putting people first, also within the national accounts (NAs) system. The sub-sectoring of Households accounts by groups of households would certainly represent a way of pursuing such objective. Two methods can be used: the top-down method, which breaks down NAs totals (top) according to a set of indicators derived from micro data on household economic resources; the bottom-up method, which uses micro data (bottom) to derive NAs totals. In this paper, we discuss pros and cons of the two methods especially from a practical point of view. Particularly, we present an application of the top-down method for Italy and describe the on-going process towards a full-fledged bottom-up approach for the building of Italian National Accounts.