Empirical comparison of small area estimation methods for the Italian Labour Force Survey - ARCHIVED

The study was undertaken to evaluate some alternative small areas estimators to produce level estimates for unplanned domains from the Italian Labour Force Sample Survey. In our study, the small areas are the Health Service Areas, which are unplanned sub-regional territorial domains and were not isolated at the time of sample design and thus cut across boundaries of the design strata. We consider the following estimators: post-stratified ratio, synthetic, composite expressed as linear combination of synthetic and of post-stratified ratio, and sample size dependent. For all the estimators considered in this study, the average percent relative biases and the average relative mean square errors were obtained in a Monte Carlo study in which the sample design was simulated using data from the 1981 Italian Census.