and reported income in the CSES data. The tax on immovable property and the vehicle tax are modeled based on the estimated value of the property which is reported in the data, and the type(s) of car(s) which are reported by the household. There is not enough information in the data to assign the exact value of the vehicle tax, so the tax is imputed based on the characteristics that are available in the CSES.

- B) Property taxes in Cambodia are levied on means of transportation and on fixed assets. These are assigned to households based on a joint declared sum of property taxes reported in the CSES data, which is disaggregated into means of transportation tax and property tax using information on vehicle ownership and vehicle characteristics. The residual amount is assigned as property tax.

- C) The CSES data does not provide much detail concerning welfare transfers and itemizes only receipts of scholarships. Therefore, direct transfers are only divided into scholarships and (other) welfare transfers. We adjust transfer receipt values among households eligible to the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) to reflect the applicable values of the CCT. Pensions constitute part of overall welfare payments in the CSES 2019/20 data and cannot be separately identified. In Cambodia pensions however are a very small proportion of household incomes – in 2017 for example (when they could be separately identified) they amounted to 3% of total household incomes.

- D) Indirect taxes and subsidies are calculated based on the general rules applied to consumption taxation and the information provided in the CSES on household expenditures; this applies both to the VAT and excise duties, as well as to the imputation of electricity subsidies calculated based on location and reported cost and usage of electricity. The purchase of food products in rural areas is treated as informal and thus not subject to VAT in the model.

- E) In-kind transfers are allocated to households based on either age eligibility (education) or declared usage of these services (health). In the case of education values are imputed using information on public school attendance children’s age eligibility. In the case of health care, we use the information on declared use of health care services in the data and impute their value using estimates of intervention costs from Flessa et al. (2018) and Jacobs et al. (2019).

# **Macro-validation of the simulated fiscal policy elements**

The data used for this study allow us to analyze only a proportion of fiscal interventions since much of government spending and revenues cannot be directly assigned to specific households in the data. The CEQ methodology in Cambodia covers the dimensions of fiscal policy which account for about 19.3 percent of total government revenues and 23.2 percent of total government spending.

To test the quality of the survey data and modelled fiscal elements, total imputed/simulated taxes and benefits are compared against administrative statistics. The exercise aims to see how precisely the total taxes (transfers) collected from (paid to) households in the survey matches the total tax collections (spending) reflected in budget documents. Table 3 shows the results of the validation exercise.

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