The survey consists of data on the fiscal household as defined by the government for the purpose of collecting the tax. For each household, the survey assigns one person as the 'fiscal head', the individual primarily responsible for collecting the tax. The file is hierarchical with two record types. Each record has 6 cards and each card is 80 characters long. The first record type is an economic record which provides data on the entire household.
All households have one.
The second record type is a demographic record listing information on individual members of the household. Consistency and edit checks have been carried out for all variables. There are no restrictions on access to the public use files. The corresponding documentation is available to download at the same web site as the Catasto documentation, but is not bundled with the Catasto documentation. Because standard analysis packages such as SAS or SPSS require each case to have the same format, the original Catasto public use file was awkward to work with.