Designing stratified sampling in economic and business surveys

Abstract

In most economic and business surveys, the target variables (e.g. turnover of enterprises, income of households, etc.) commonly resemble skewed distributions with many small and few large units. In such surveys, if a stratified sampling technique is used as a method of sampling and estimation, the convenient way of stratification such as the use of demographical variables (e.g. gender, socioeconomic class, geographical region, religion, ethnicity, etc.) or other natural criteria, which is widely practiced in economic surveys, may fail to form homogeneous strata and is not much useful in order to increase the precision of the estimates of variables of interest. In this paper, a stratified sampling design for economic surveys based on auxiliary information has been developed, which can be used for constructing optimum stratification and determining optimum sample allocation to maximize the precision in estimate.

Keywords:

• economic survey
• stratified random sampling
• optimum stratification
• optimum sample size allocation
• mathematical programming problem
• dynamic programming technique

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the editor and the referees for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.