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Balancing the National Accounts: Comments on Papers By Andy Blake and Nigel Pain (NIESR) and Peter Kenny (CSO)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Martin Weale
Martin Weale*
Affiliation:
Department of Applied Economics and Clare College, Cambridge
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Extract

The idea of balancing the national accounts can be traced back to the start of national accounting in its modern form. Estimates of national income had been produced in the years before the Second World War, but the first attempt to cast economic data in an accounting framework was that of Meade and Stone (1941). A year later the first paper on balancing the national accounts (Stone, Champernowne and Meade, 1942) appeared. Had the least squares approach, which Peter Kenny at the CSO has worked on, been computationally feasible at the time, balanced accounts would probably be taken as a matter of course, and would not be seen as a slightly confusing adjunct to the conventional ways of presenting the data.

Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 135 , February 1991 , pp. 86 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

Financial support from the ESRC under grant no. R00023 1814 is gratefully acknowledged.

References

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