Income in kind

In practice, some elements of income in kind are currently included in the measurement of disposable household income that forms the basis for the indicators used to monitor income inequality and risk of poverty across the EU - i.e. in the definition adopted by the EU-SILC. These are benefits provided as part of earnings from employment - in practice, mainly company cars. One element that is not included in most cases and that is important in some Member States, especially for households in rural areas, is the production of goods for own consumption, despite the fact that data on this are collected by the EU-SILC. 

It is by no means clear, however, to what extent this element is accurately reported by the survey, since there is no other source of information against which the data in EU-SILC can be checked. It is also the case that the data concerned are not shown separately for the self-employed (who are perhaps the most likely recipients of this kind of income), but are aggregated together with their monetary income.[1] A particular issue is whether, and to what extent, the production of smallholdings is accurately recorded by the survey. These are almost exclusively geared to own consumption - in many cases they produce no output at all for the market - and they account for a significant proportion of employment in some Member States, especially Romania, Poland and Lithuania.

[1] According to the description of the variable in the documentation published by Eurostat with the EU-SILC user database.