EU-SILC Tools: eusilcpanel_2020 - first computational steps towards a cumulative sample based on the EU-SILC longitudinal datasets; Update

Abstract

The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) covers a wide array of variables collected from households by the Member States. Among others, EU-SILC contains panel data that follows a rotational design. Each year, Eurostat publishes a series of separate datasets covering only up to 4 years, even though it has been collecting data since 2003. "eusilcpanel" is a script written by Marwin Borst (download: https://www.gesis.org/gml/european-microdata/eu-silc/) in the form of a Stata package (eusilcpanel.ado; eusilcpanel.sthlp; totalpopulation.dta), that is able to merge these chunks of data into one cumulative dataset (separately for the D-,H-,R-, and P-data). The script makes the EU-SILC panel more accessible to researchers in the vast majority of cases, but it can’t deal with data from all countries. eusilcpanel_2020 (incl. eusilcpanel_2020.ado; eusilcpanel.sthlp; totalpopulation_2003_2021.dta) is an update of eusilcpanel. It covers the EU-SILC longitudinal releases 2005 to 2020. Both, eu-silcpanel and eusilcpanel_2020 can be downloaded here: https://www.gesis.org/en/missy/materials/EU-SILC/tools/datahandling or here https://www.gesis.org/gml/european-microdata/eu-silc => eusilcpanel - UPDATE (2022). The original script was based on CSV data. However, since 2017 the CSV files are released by country and year. The CSV data are sometimes subject to noise, therefore eusilcpanel_2020 is based on ‘cleaned’ Stata system files (based on Stata scripts provided by GESIS https://www.gesis.org/en/missy/materials/EU-SILC/setups). Please note, as from 2021, the EU-SILC panel design was extended on a voluntary basis to a six-year rotational panel design. However, at the time of updating this paper (2022) the longitudinal Scientific-Use-Files still cover only up to 4 years.