Initial data collected from 3,700 residences for the Household Budgetary Survey will be released at the end of this year, six years since the latest published results.
The National Statistics Office yesterday told this newspaper that data for the latest survey was collected between April 2015 and March this year, with the full data planned for release next year.
“The Household Budgetary Survey is a complex exercise, and work starts before the data collection. Among others, this includes the design of the survey, establishing the sampling procedure, recruitment and the trainingof interviewers.
“Once data is collected, there is intensive work related to verification, calibration and analysis,” a spokesman said when contacted following calls for updated data this week.
In comments to The Sunday Times of Malta about the minimum wage, economist Philip Von Brockdorff had said the update was long overdue.
On Wednesday, Union Ħaddiema Magħqudin CEO Josef Vella also called for its publication, given the current debate on the minimum wage.
He said the survey was meant to take place every five years, and the union was awaiting the results before deciding at what level the minimum wage should be set.
Yesterday Mr Vella told this newspaper that such a survey should be ongoing, to reassure people that the cost of living was under control.
He insisted that despite being published in 2010, the data for the latest survey had been collected two years earlier, and so the tools available were outdated.
The NSO spokesman said the survey for 2008 was carried out between March 2008 and February 2009, and published in August of 2010. The previous 2000 survey, held between March 2000 and February 2001, was published in April 2003.
The full 2015 report is planned for publication in mid-2017, with preliminary findings released towards the end of 2016.
The main aim of the survey is to illustrate patterns in household expenditure and how these are distributed among different goods and services.
Its data serves as one of the main sources of input to establish the base weightings that are used in consumer price indices: the Retail Price Index (RPI) and the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP).
The Cola mechanism meanwhile uses the RPI.
The RPI is not bound by specific timeframes in terms of when the weightings should be re-assessed, but the weightings at a granular level cannot be more than seven years old.
The weightings from the new survey will be used as input for the price indices in early 2017, as soon as the technical work is finalised.