Introduction

The use of social accounting matrices (SAMs) to record all of the transactions that take place in a national economy during one year has a distinguished ancestry. This ancestry can be traced back at least as far as Quesnay's (1759) Tableau économique. (See Studenski, 1958 and Stone's 1986 Nobel Memorial Lecture for histories of social accounting.) In the twentieth century, social accounting has been heavily influenced by the work on national income accounts by Kuznets (1937) and that on input–output matrices by Leontief (1941). The development of SAMs as they are used today began with the work by Meade and Stone (1941) for the Economic Section of the British Cabinet Office, which developed the first logically complete set of double-entry national income accounts. Subsequent work by Stone (1947) resulted in the conventions for social accounting embodied in the United Nations' (1953, 1968) system of national accounts and currently used throughout the world.

The development of social accounting went hand-in-hand with the development of planning models that used these data. Indeed, Meade and Stone's (1941) original work was meant to provide data to aid in implementing Keynes's (1940) proposals for funding Britain's war effort during the Second World War. Stone's later work on social accounting in Britain provided data for the Cambridge Growth Model at the Department of Applied Economics. Indeed, in the hands of some users, SAMs have become economic models in and of themselves, with spread-sheet type relationships between entries.