A Feasibility Study on Calibration for Selected South-East Asia Household Surveys

Modern large-scale household surveys are expected to provide high quality estimates of population parameters, compatible across data sources. However, signals of possible bias have occasionally been detected for some South-East Asia countries. For instance, the World Bank’s Household Survey Unit found significant discrepancies between survey-based estimates of age-sex and household size distributions and the corresponding Census counts for Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. A feasibility study has been carried out to investigate whether this issue could be solved through a preliminary calibration procedure. Three Proofs of Concept have been carried out using the ReGenesees open source package. The study showed that it was technically feasible to integrate a calibration procedure in the production workflow of all household surveys taken into account.