Search

The problem of balancing economic accounts has been recognized for a long time. In 1942, Richard Stone et al. proposed a weighted least squares approach (hereafter SCM approach) to balance small economic accounts. This approach has been extended to accommodate reconciliation of large-scale national accounts (NA) systems. The main challenge turned out to be the estimates of the uncertainties of initial NA aggregates. In this study, we try the SCM approach for automatically balancing a large-scale supply-use framework in the Swedish NA. Efforts are made to estimate the uncertainties not only from sampling errors but also from non-sampling errors. The error estimates are used as weights in the balancing procedure. The approach is evaluated through a test run in parallel with a real compilation of the Swedish annual NA. Our study shows that the automatic balancing procedure is feasible to implement in the production environment of Statistics Sweden. Compared with the current mainly manual balancing process, the automatic procedure is faster, cheaper and requires less time from the NA experts. Above all, the method is transparent and new information can easily be accounted for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study a scenario model is used to examine if foreseen technological developments are capable of reducing CO2emissions in 2050 to a level consistent with United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreements, which aim at maximizing the temperature rise to 2 °C compared to pre-industrial levels. The model is based on a detailed global environmentally extended supply–use table (EE SUT) for the year 2000, called EXIOBASE. This global EE SUT allows calculating how the final demand in each region drives activities in production sectors, and hence related CO2emissions, in each region. Using this SUT framework, three scenarios have been constructed for the year 2050. The first is a business-as-usual scenario (BAU), which takes into account population, economic growth, and efficiency improvements. The second is a techno-scenario (TS), adding feasible and probable climate mitigation technologies to the BAU scenario. The third is the towards-2-degrees scenario (2DS), with a demand shift or growth reduction scenario added to the TS to create a 2 °C scenario. The emission results of the three scenarios are roughly in line with outcomes of typical scenarios from integrated assessment models. Our approach indicates that the 2 °C target seems difficult to reach with advanced CO2emission reduction technologies alone. Policy relevance The overall outlook in this scenario study is not optimistic. We show that CO2emissions from steel and cement production and air and sea transport will become dominant in 2050. They are difficult to reduce further. Using biofuels in air and sea transport will probably be problematic due to the fact that agricultural production largely will be needed to feed a rising global population and biofuel use for electricity production grows substantially in 2050. It seems that a more pervasive pressure towards emission reduction is required, also influencing the basic fabric of society in terms of types and volumes of energy use, materials use, and transport. Reducing envisaged growth levels, hence reducing global gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, might be one final contribution needed for moving to the 2 °C target, but is not on political agendas now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a method to consolidate national supply–use tables (SUTs) into a single supra-regional SUT. The method deals with mirror trade statistics problems, such as the different valuation of imports and exports, and it corrects for double-counting re-exports. The method is tested by means of a decomposition of value added and CO2emissions embodied in EU27 exports to third countries. When the national SUTs for the period 2000–2007 are used, neglecting intra-European Union spillover and feedback effects results in an underestimation of the embodied value added of 12–15%. Not consolidating the national tables properly leads to a further underestimation of 11–16%. With these underestimations removed, EU27 foreign exports still only explain around 11% of EU27 Gross Domestic Product, whereas they explain 17% of the EU27 CO2emissions. Hence, the income benefits of these exports are, in relative terms, considerably smaller than their CO2emission cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the 1993 System of National Accounts, the annual Supply–Use Tables (SUTs) need to be compiled at both current and constant prices by the National Institutes of Statistics. The most appropriate way to obtain consistent SUTs at both current and constant prices is to balance them simultaneously but, in this case, the main complexity is the nonlinearity that inevitably occurs. This paper proposes a new method to balance extremely large sets of National Accounts simultaneously at current and constant prices. The distinctive features of the proposed balancing method are its flexibility, which is very high compared with the other methods in the literature, and its capability to allow the control of the consistency of the system of deflators that are used. This new balancing method has been applied to balance the Italian 2006 SUTs simultaneously at current and constant prices, and it has yielded very good outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2008 System of National Accounts recognizes capital services as the conceptually correct way to measure the input of capital into production. This allows setting up an integrated system of industry-level and aggregate productivity accounts that are consistent with the 2008 SNA. The paper discusses the new aspects in the 2008 SNA and sets out such an integrated system, based on Jorgenson's aggregate production possibility frontier and gross output-based industry productivity measures. Recent results for industry productivity measures for the United States complete the picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]