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The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable development in the science of national accounting. This development has taken or is taking place in three interrelated systems of accounts: first, the national product accounts; second, input-output accounts; and, third, money flows or flow of funds accounts. The national product accounts are concerned with transactions reflecting the economy's over-all productive accomplishment, that is, principally with incomes and expenditures measuring the value of final product. The input-output accounts focus on transactions between productive establishments and thereby supplement the national product accounts by providing an intensive analysis of technological interrelationships within the economy. The money flows or flow of funds accounts trace transactions in financial claims as well as goods and services and thereby contribute—what is lacking in the other two systems—an intensive analysis of financial interrelationships within the economy. The national transactions accounts in process of preparation in Ottawa are a version of this third type of accounts.

Central banks are unique institutions. Most of them, including the Bank of Canada, are endowed with powers and charged with responsibilities that are as heavy and as general as those of the most important departments of government. Yet, by contrast, they usually enjoy a legal status which provides them with a degree of autonomy that greatly exceeds that of any department. In a political system based on parliamentary and responsible government, a central bank is, indeed, almost a constitutional anomaly.A central bank, uniquely constituted or not, is a necessary organ of any monetary system based on an inconvertible paper currency. When money has a marginal cost of zero, it is necessary that the amount of the issue be limited by some means or another if its average market value is not also to become zero. Both logic and history seem to indicate that this limitation is best achieved by placing a monopoly of the note issue in the hands of a central bank or a similar agency. The creation of such a monopoly does not, of course, provide any indisputable answer to the important question of the degree of discretion which such an issuing authority might be permitted to enjoy. There are still some economists extant who advocate that the central bank be bound to a prescription so rigid that its role in the monetary system would be entirely mechanical. However, this view has a rather archaic quality. The dominant current opinion is quite different. Most economists and monetary analysts regard the central bank as, properly, an instrument of monetary management operating in an economy that requires, if it is to be stable and efficient, the continuous discretionary influence of such a management authority.