| Sumario: | Comparisons with data from other sources are an important means of monitoring the consistency of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE). The CE, which consists of a diary survey and an interview survey, provides continuous and comprehensive data on the expenditures, income, and other characteristics of American consumers. The National Income and Product Accounts' estimates of expenditures for goods and services from the personal sector, based largely on records of sales by business and government enterprises, are a principal source of independent data to measure against the CE's results. Such comparisons provide a sense of the degree and direction of possible survey errors rather than an exact measure of bias, since specific estimates from other sources may themselves be wrong.
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