An alternative for the estimation of the average income using small area methods

The average household income is one of the most important indexes for decision making and the modelling of economic inequity and poverty. In this work we propose a practical procedure to estimate the average income using small area methods. We illustrate our proposal using information from a multipurpose survey and suitable economic and demographic variables such as the multidimensional poverty and the valorization indexes and the official population projections. We find that the standard relative errors for the income average estimates improve substantially when the proposed methodology is implemented.