Measuring the Government Sector of the U.S. Economic Accounts (1998) / Chapter Skim
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Implementing the System of National Accounts
Implementing the System of National Accounts
Pages 10-16
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From page 10... ...
It is clear to us that certain general principles pertaining to the transition to the SNA are critical. These include the need for full documentation of changes; the need to relate national account measures to other measures of government finances, such as the unified budget; the desirability of reasonable consistency of practice among different sectors of the accounts; and the need to facilitate ease of use.
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From page 11... ...
In addition to the national accounts, major sources of information about federal government finances include current service budget estimates prepared by OMB and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) , the President's budget requests, congressional enactments of authorizations and appropriations, Treasury Department statements of actual receipts and expenditures, and Census Bureau statistical series on federal spending by type by city and county.
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From page 12... ...
This information in turn becomes the primary input for the NIPA estimates of state and local government finances. Tables published annually in the NIPAs reconcile the NIPA estimates of federal government receipts and expenditures with the federal unified budget and the NIPA estimates of state and local government receipts and expenditures with the Bureau of the Census government finance data.5 In addition, BEA each year publishes estimates of the President's budget requests on a NIPA basis: these include quarterly as well as annual estimates so that the timing of receipts and expenditures can be better understood and analysis can be performed on either a fiscal or calendar year basis (see, e.g., Beall and Northwood, 1995~.
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From page 13... ...
Complete consistency may be neither feasible nor desirable, but workshop participants expressed interest in continued research on incorporating market price information into the valuation of government output. This is discussed further below, in "Going Beyond the System of National Accounts." Government Employee Pension Plans As discussed above, the SNA treats fully funded government employee pension plans consistently with private pension plans, classifying employer contributions as income of the household sector and the net equity of pension funds as household assets.
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From page 14... ...
, the SNA criteria are interpreted as adding publicly owned hospitals and colleges and universities, as well as some federal lending activities, to the groups of entities included as government enterprises. Colleges and universities offer an example of the difficulties inherent in deciding where the line should be drawn between government enterprises and general government.
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From page 15... ...
These are only two of many examples of complex classification questions to which there is no single solution. Cross classifications of government and government enterprise activities by industry or function comparable to private industry classifications (for profit and not for profit)
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From page 16... ...
These principles should reflect the need to maintain and enhance the usefulness of the accounts for a variety of applications and by a wide and varied group of users and should include: · provision of sufficient information on the derivation and composition of changes to permit reconstruction of the government sector of the accounts on its traditional basis; · presentation of the supplementary information needed to compare government activities by industry with private components of the same industry and to relate the government sector of the accounts to other measures of government receipts and expenditures; · maintenance of reasonable consistency of the government sector with other sectors of the national income and product accounts with respect to definitions, classifications, and estimation practices, including valuation and imputation techniques; and · preservation of sufficient clarity and simplicity of basic presentations.
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