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Maintaining the National Accounts as Official Statistics
Author(s) -
Lynch Robin,
Thage Bent
Publication year - 2017
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/roiw.12327
Subject(s) - national accounts , productivity , national income and product accounts , government (linguistics) , gross fixed capital formation , economics , public economics , official statistics , core (optical fiber) , business , economic growth , accounting , statistics , computer science , gross domestic product , telecommunications , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics
Confidence in national accounts is undermined by expanding the conceptual framework to serve the needs of productivity analysis. Extensions of the SNA to include knowledge assets as produced output and direct volume measures of government output require an increasing number of assumptions and imputations, which threaten the status of national accounts as a reliable source of official economic statistics. Both national accounts and productivity analysis would be better served by meeting the data needs of productivity analysis through satellite systems. It is recommended that the movement towards increased recognition of capital formation of knowledge in the core system of national accounts be halted. The recording of the performance of Research and Development expenditures as capital formation and the endorsement of direct volume measures for the provision of government services introduced with the 2008 SNA should be reconsidered in the next revision of the SNA.