Designing Nonmarket Accounts for the United States Interim Report (2003) / Chapter Skim
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2 Objectives, Scope, and Priorities
2 Objectives, Scope, and Priorities
Pages 8-17
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From page 8... ...
Topics studied included the system's lack of usefulness for describing income distribution among households and between geographical regions; its failure to account for many production and investment activities taking place in households; its treatment of many "intermediate" ant} investment activities as if they were "final" consumption activities; ancl its overly simplistic accounting for the complex fabric of federal, state, ant! local governmental activities.
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From page 9... ...
Perhaps less well 2A complete answer to the question of how the growth in female labor force participation has affected the true growth in national output would depend not only on the shares of women performing market work versus unpaid household work, but also on the relative productivity of each sector. As is discussed later in the chapter, this argues for the importance of including outputs in adclition to inputs in the design of any potential nonmarket accounts.
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From page 10... ...
This, in turn, may affect where welfare and poverty lines are drawn (Michael, 1996~. Policy interventions that have positive effects on marketed outputs could have offsetting negative effects on nonmarketed outputs which, if they tract been properly anticipates!
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From page 11... ...
The scope and coverage of national accounting systems has been changing since the initial efforts by William Petty to estimate England's national income in 1665.3 By modern stanciarcts, Petty's accounts, albeit based on fragmentary data, were fairly wide in scope, covering, besides purchases in the market, imputed values for household production (Kendrick: 285~. Far more narrow were the concepts of the French physiocrats, who believed that only agriculture produced a true net product, or the concepts of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who believed that the only measure of a country's productive capacity was in its ability to produce material goocls, that is excluding services.
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From page 12... ...
If "imputations procedures" always refers to data that are not directly observable, then it is clearly the case that the clevelopment of nearly all national accounting data, whether market, near market, or nonmarket, involves some degree of imputation. Output Versus Welfare Measurement Goals It is impossible to lay out a case for the appropriate scope of nonmarket accounts without specifying the measurement objective.
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From page 13... ...
The fact that a nonmarket, welfare-affecting entity such as clean air may lack a market price and thus lack a natural money measure does not mean that it is conceptually dissimilar from more marketed elements that reflect economic welfare. Restricting the coverage of the accounts in this manner does mean the exclusion of many factors that influence general welfare.
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From page 14... ...
In sum, even if the goals for a set of augmented accounts are limited primarily to measurement of output—with home production probably being the clearest examplethere is still plenty of work to do. Also, the range of activities that seem most amenable to convincing measurement involve input and output valuation methods that resemble those used in the current accounts.
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From page 15... ...
If expanded environmental accounts can suggest policy targeting that can save billions of dollars, the developmental costs of such accounts will be worthwhile. Another area the panel considered that might satisfy these criteria is the undergrouncl economy, which includes illegal and other activities generating unreported income.
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From page 16... ...
Additionally, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, working with the United Nations Statistics Division, has produced a new Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions in the System of National Accounts. The handbook, which was approved for distribution in March 2002, recommends that national statistical agencies develop a satellite account on the nonprofit sector that, among other things, estimates the value of volunteer labor used by these Organizations.
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From page 17... ...
part, using existing or planner! data sources.
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