Q&A about the Family Income and Expenditure Survey

Basics

1 What is the Family Income and Expenditure Survey ?

2 What is found in the results of the FIES ?

3 How is the FIES used ?

Methodology

4 Although the FIES does not cover one-person households and households engaged in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, are the results of the FIES able to represent household consumption of entire Japan ?

5 Are the sample households of the FIES biased towards peculiar households such as government officials' ?

6 Are the results of the FIES biased because the survey sample contained too many government officials' households ?

7 Why are quantities investigated also in the FIES ?

8 How does the Statistics Bureau conduct the FIES accurately under such circumstances as the number of households which keep family account books has been decreasing ?

9 How do you make it possible to survey income and expenditures of whole household when it includes the grown-up children of household head ?

Tips for understanding the FIES results

10 Why do the data from the FIES show a different trend from department store sales statistics or supermarket sales statistics ?

11 How accurate are the data from the FIES with only 8,000 samples of two-or-more-person households ?

12 Why do the data from the FIES show a different trend from the private final consumption expenditure in the Quarterly Estimates of GDP (QE) of the National Accounts of Japan ?

13 Why does the income in the FIES show a different trend from the wages in the Monthly Labour Survey ?

Others

14 Is it hard for the FIES users to grasp the timely consumption trend because the data are released later than other statistics ?

15 Do the consumption expenditures in the FIES decrease only because the number of household members decreases ?

16 Is the FIES able to catch up with the recent trends in consumer behavior such as an increase in expenditure on goods and services related to information and technology ?