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RECENT EXPERIENCES IN THE USE OF SOCIAL ACCOUNTING IN THE NETHERLANDS
Author(s) -
Stuvel G.
Publication year - 1951
Publication title -
review of income and wealth
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.024
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1475-4991
pISSN - 0034-6586
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-4991.1951.tb01040.x
Subject(s) - plan (archaeology) , citation , accounting , sociology , library science , political science , economics , history , law , computer science , archaeology
SOCIAL accounting got started in the Netherlands during the war. This was mainly due to Ed. van Cleeff and Professor Derksen. It fell to the latter, as a member of the staff of the Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics (NCBS), to construct a provisional set of national accounts and to prepare preliminary estimates for the 1938 accounts.l After the war the NCBS resumed its work on social accounting, and as a first result we have now available the 1946 accounts and some preliminary estimates for 1947.% The NCBS, however, is not the only institute in the Nether-lands which applies the social accounting approacll in its work. The same is done by the Netherlands Central Planning Bureau (NCPB), a government office, set up immediately after the war under the directorship of Professor Tinbergen. Thanks to its director, central economic planning in the Netherlands has been subjected right from the start to the discipline of social account-i ~ ~ g. ~ So most probably Holland has been not only the first country in the world to have a set of national accounts with real figures in it, but also the first country where the central economic plan was presented in the form of a national budget. The use of the social accounting approach in university teaching should also be mentioned here. In this connection it is worth noting that last year Professor Koopmans, of the Rotterdam School of Economics, gave a year's course of lectures on the national budget, the national accounts and related subjects. My own experience with social accounting springs mainly from its use for planning purposes. I shall therefore concentrate in this paper on this special use. Even so, I shall have to confine myself here to a treatment in broad terms of the main issues