The 1995/1996 Household Income, Expenditure - (PDF, 101 mb ...

y the large C.V. that sampling and non-sampling error around the estimate
may be a problem. Precision suffers also in the measurement of Cairo's
housing and utilities expenditures - the confidence band around the mean is
one-third to one-fourth of the estimate. The "Other Urban" region appears
ahead of the other regions in most expenditures, ultimately in total
expenditures.
ILE Extent of Self-Sufficiency
11.7
Households in the HIECS produce for their own consumption. The
amount of home production depends mainly on where the household resides.
The importance of home production cannot be understated. The imputed value
of home produced items (mainly food) divided by the total (market) value of
actual consumption gives a percentage that indicates the extent of household
self-sufficiency. This is presented by region in Table II.4. The frequency,
the sample percentage, the row percentage, and the column percentage are
shown in each cell. Naturally household production is most prevalent in the
rural areas, with Lower and Upper Rural Egypt dominating. More than threequarters
of households with a home-produced ratio of greater than 40% are in
Lower Rural Egypt.
The System of National Accounts (SNA) of the United Nations considers
household "subsistence production," or "production on own account," to be
both an income and an expenditure (see UN (1982». By definition, a
household which is completely "self-sufficient" has a total expenditure which
equals the total income from its production. Intuitively, household production
itself is fully income for the household, and that part consumed is clearly
consumption expenditure. In practice the distinction sometimes is not so
clear-cut, especially with components having "investment value." In training,
for example, interviewers were told (erroneously) not to include household
expenditures on chicken feed for fear of double-counting (when the household
consumed the chicken). The exact accounting for the consumption of that
chicken would have the household subtract the overall cost of chicken feed
from the total market value of the chicken as an expenditure, then to tally
also the total income market value of that chicken. In truth the real values
of goods produced at home are the values of those goods in the highest cost
alternative market. It is often an unreasonable assumption that the
respondent has such detailed knowledge of market conditions to provide a
proper valuation of withdrawals from production. Confusion often arises with
regard to the final realization of both capital and non-capital commodities, too.
Taken to its logical extreme, the valuation of goods can become tautological:
What if the household purchases a hoe? How can we assume that the hoe will
be used in farm production?
CAPMAS can be accused of having an "expenditure bias" in its
surveying, because it has always suspected income measures. The last survey
was the first time they tabulated income at all, and then only badly. It is
known and expected that respondents have more income sources than they
admit, but there seems too much willingness on the part of the survey
authorities to accept this situation casually. For a country serious about the
proper measurement of incomes, own production and the imputed value of
owners' equivalent rent need to be recognized as both incomes and
expenditures. The estimation of consumption is really quite difficult without a