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

In: National Institute economic review: journal of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Volume 135, p. 86-90

Abstract

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.