Sampling design variance estimation of small area estimators in the Spanish Labour Force survey.
The main goal of this paper is to investigate how to estimate sampling design variances of modelbased and model-assisted small area estimators in a complex survey sampling setup. For this purpose the Spanish Labour Force Survey is considered. Sample and aggregated data are taken from the Canary Islands in the second trimester of 2003 in order to obtain some small area estimators of ILO unemployment totals. Several problems arising from the application of standard small area estimation procedures...