The Living Conditions and Culture statistics within the Social Directorate is responsible for various surveys and statistics. These include the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) which is an annual survey aimed at collecting statistics on income, social inclusion and living conditions.
The Household Budgetary Survey (HBS) is another year-long survey that falls within the remit of this Unit. In a nutshell this survey seeks to gauge the changes in expenditure patterns and how the expenditure is distributed amongst different goods and services by private residential households in Malta and Gozo. Unlike the EU-SILC, the HBS is not carried out every year. The last HBS was carried out in 2008. A new survey was launched in 2015 and data collection will last until March 2016. The first set of results from this survey will be provided be end 2016 or the first quarter of 2017.
This Unit also tackles Culture statistics and is currently following a programme established in collaboration with the Creative Economy Working Group. The culture programme endeavours to achieve the collection of data on various topics mainly from the demand side, covering various topics such as: libraries, museums, theatres, performing arts etc. The Unit also cooperated with the Valletta 18 Strategy group, on statistical projects required for their strategy The Unit also reports Crime statistics on a yearly basis whereby this entails the collection of data on human trafficking, money laundering, cybercrime etc in collaboration with the police authorities, the Ministry of Justice, the law courts and other relevant departments.
Nevertheless, apart from these surveys and statistics the Unit also undertakes other ad-hoc projects from time to time that fall within its area of responsibility.
Without any doubt, end users of the results produced by this unit are widespread as they range from policy makers, other units within the institution to researchers.