国民经济核算体系

国民经济核算体系 ( SNA) 是国民经济核算的国际标准体系，第一版国际标准于1953年发布。 并随后发布了1968年修订版、1993年修订版和2008年修订版。 国民经济核算体系以其各种发布的版本，经常进行重大的本地调整，已被许多国家采用。它不断发展，并由联合国、国际货币基金组织、世界银行、经济合作与发展组织和欧盟统计局维护。

SNA 的目标是提供一个综合、完整的账户系统，以便对所有重要经济活动进行国际比较。建议各国以SNA为指导构建本国的国民核算体系，以促进国际可比性。然而，遵守国际标准完全是自愿的，不能严格执行。一些国家（例如法国、美国和中国）使用的系统与国民账户体系有很大不同。就其本身而言，这并不是一个主要问题，只要每个系统都提供足够的数据，这些数据可以根据国民账户体系标准进行修改以编制国民账户。

SNA为市场经济国家使用的核算体系。中国大陆在改革開放後，自1992年完整引入该核算体系，取代之前的《国民经济平衡表体系》（MPS），并与联合国国民经济核算体系（UNSNA）接轨。

数据发布

成员国的经济和金融数据用于编制有关生产总值、投资、资本交易、政府支出和对外贸易的年度（有时是季度）数据。结果发表在联合国年鉴《国民账户统计：主要总量和详细表格》中，该年鉴目前（直至 2008 年修订版生效）遵循 1993 年的建议。 提供的值以本国货币表示。

此外，国家统计局也可能发布 SNA 类型的数据。更详细的数据通常可以按需提供。由于国民账户数据极易被修改（因为涉及大量不同数据源、条目和估算过程会影响总量结果），因此不同年份不同出版物针对同一会计期间的总量数据也经常存在差异。由于新的数据来源、统计方法或概念的变化，“最终数字”可能会被多次追溯修改。每年的修订程度可能很小，但累积例如十年的修订后，数据差异可能会显着改变趋势。这是研究人员在寻求连贯一致的数据集时应该牢记的事情。

质量和覆盖范围

各国国民账户数据的质量和全面性各不相同。原因包括：

• 一些政府在统计研究上投入的资金远多于其他政府。
• 一些国家的经济活动比其他国家更难准确衡量（例如，灰色经济规模庞大、文盲普遍存在、缺乏现金经济、由于地理因素或社会政治不稳定而难以获得调查机会、人员流动性很大）人员和资产——在撒哈拉以南非洲国家尤其如此）。
• 一些统计机构比其他机构拥有更多的科学自主权和预算自由裁量权，使它们能够开展其他统计机构因法律、政治或财务原因而无法开展的调查或统计报告。
• 一些国家（例如荷兰、德国、英国、波兰和澳大利亚）在社会统计领域拥有强大的知识（学术或文化）传统，通常可以追溯到一百年甚至几百年前，而其他国家（例如正如许多非洲国家一样，政府最近才开始组织人口普查，而大多数大学也很晚才开始组织人口普查）。重要的是，一个社会是否看到统计的价值，是否广泛利用统计专业知识用于分析和政策目的，从而对统计行业进行投资。
• 尽管签署了国际公约，联合国几乎没有权力强制成员国按照特定标准进行数据统计；作为国际联盟的成员（例如欧盟、经合组织，或美国），协议要求联盟成员国必须提供标准化数据集，以进行国家间比较，即使这些标准化数据集可能对组织本身没有太多用处。因此，可能存在产生国际组织需要的更全面的统计信息的“外部激励”，来激励部分国家，但这些激励可能对其他国家没什么效果。

SNA主要账户

SNA 包括以下主要账户

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• the production account (components of gross output)
• the primary distribution of income account (incomes generated by production)
• the transfers (redistribution) account (including social spending)
• the household expenditure account
• the capital account
• the (domestic) financial transactions account ("flow of funds")
• the changes in asset values account
• the assets and liabilities account (balance sheet)
• the external transactions account (balance of payments)

这些账户包括各种附件和子账户，还为显示生产部门之间交易的投入产出表提供了标准。

几乎所有联合国成员国都提供收入和产品账户，但不一定提供全套标准账户或全套数据，以提供标准会计信息。例如，家庭的标准化资产和负债账户几乎不存在，有待开发。

最近的一项进展是尝试建立自然资源战略库存的标准账户。

发展

SNA继续得到进一步发展，并定期召开国际会议来讨论各种概念和计量问题。

一些例子包括环境资源账户的构建、服务贸易和资本存量的计量、保险付款的处理、灰色经济、股票期权或其他非工资收入形式的员工补偿、无形资本

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Discussions and updates are reported in SNA News & Notes [3]. SNA Revisions are documented at the UN Statistics Division site [4] （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）

The 2008 SNA Revision

For the 2008 SNA Revision, the full text is available online: [5] （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）. The OECD provides some overview commentary [6] （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）.

The revision of the 1993 system was coordinated by the Intersecretariat Working Group on National Accounts (ISWGNA) comprising the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat) and the United Nations regional commissions.

The ISWGNA working group has its own website under the UN Statistics Division.

对国民账户体系的批评

一般批评

对国民账户体系最普遍的批评一直是它的概念没有充分反映现实世界的相互作用、关系和活动——原因有多种，但主要是因为：

• 该系统没有提供特定经济现象的明确细节，从而表明它们并不真正存在。
• 假设的估值方案存在问题。
• 在勇敢地尝试将所有“微观”商业活动纳入一般“宏观”标题下时，必然会导致现实结果的扭曲，因为至少一部分微观交易不容易符合一般概念标题。
• 国民账户数据并不能解决许多社会问题，因为这些问题确实需要不同类型的数据来解决，例如行为数据、态度数据或身体数据。
• 国民账户数据是由数千个不同的数据系列构建的，并且在首次官方估计发布后，结果通常会多次修订。因此，就所使用的测量概念而言，最初的估计很少是完全准确的。此外，早期发布的数据系列通常也会进行修订，有时甚至是多年后，因此数据可能永远不会完全“最终”和准确。

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Criticism of GDP

The most popular criticism of national accounts is made against the concept of gross domestic product (GDP).

In part, this criticism of GDP is misplaced, because the fault is not so much with the concept itself. It is useful to have a measure of a country's total net output, and its changes over time – that's better than having no measure at all.

The fault is with the actual use that is made of the concept by governments, intellectuals, and businessmen in public discourse. GDP is used for all kinds of comparisons, but some of those comparisons are conceptually not very appropriate.

GDP measures are frequently abused by writers who neither understand what they mean, how they were produced, nor what they can be validly used for.

Economists like Joseph Stiglitz argue that a measure of "well-being" is needed to balance a measure of output growth.

Feminist criticism

SNA has been criticised as biased by feminist economists such as Marilyn Waring and Maria Mies because no imputation for the monetary value of unpaid housework, or for unpaid voluntary labor is made in the accounts, even though the accounts do include the "imputed rental value of owner-occupied dwellings" (the market-rents which owner-occupiers would receive if they rented out the housing they occupy). This obscures the reality that market production depends to a large extent on non-market labour being performed.

However, such criticism raises several questions for the statisticians who would have to produce the data:

• whether an international standard method of imputation for the value of such services is feasible, given e.g. that the conditions under which the market equivalents for unpaid household services are supplied vary a great deal internationally ;
• whether making the imputation would result in truly meaningful, internationally comparable measures;
• whether attaching a price to voluntary labor, done primarily by women, itself actually performs an emancipatory or morally propitious function or has a general useful purpose beyond academia.

The intention of those who would like to produce this kind of standard data might be perfectly honorable, but the production of the data has to be practically justifiable in terms of technical feasibility and utility. Attaching an imaginary price to housework might not be the best data to have about housework.

In most OECD countries, statisticians have in recent years estimated the value of housework using data from time use surveys. The valuation principle often applied is that of how much a service would cost, if it was purchased at market rates, instead of being voluntarily supplied. Sometimes an "opportunity cost" method is also used: in this case, statisticians estimate how much women could earn in a paid job if they were not doing unpaid housework. Typically, the results suggest that the value of unpaid housework is close to about half the value of GDP.

Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, claimed at the IMF World Bank annual meetings in Tokyo in October 2012 that women could rescue Japan's stagnating economy, if more of them took paid jobs instead of doing unpaid care work. A 2010 Goldman Sachs report had calculated that Japan's GDP would rise by 15 percent, if the participation of Japanese women in the paid labour force was increased from 60 percent to 80 percent, matching that of men. The difficulty with this kind of argument is, that domestic and care work would still need to be done by someone, meaning women and men would need to share household responsibilities more equally, or rely on public- or private-sector provided child and eldercare. According to the ILO, there are over 52 million domestic workers in the world, who mostly work for little pay and with little legal protection. They are mainly servants of the wealthy and the middle class.

Marxist criticism

Marxian economists have criticized SNA concepts also from a different theoretical perspective on the new value added or value product. On this view, the distinctions drawn in SNA to define income from production and property income are rather capricious or eclectic, obscuring thereby the different components and sources of realised surplus value; the categories are said to be based on an inconsistent view of newly created value, conserved value, and transferred value (see also double counting). The result is that the true profit volume is underestimated in the accounts – since true profit income is larger than operating surplus – and workers' earnings are overestimated since the account shows the total labour costs to the employer rather than the "factor income" which workers actually get. If one is interested in what incomes people actually get, how much they own, or how much they borrow, national accounts often do not provide the required information.

Additionally, it is argued by Marxists that the SNA aggregate "compensation of employees" does not distinguish adequately between pre-tax and post-tax wage income, the income of higher corporate officers, and deferred income (employee and employer contributions to social insurance schemes of various kinds). "Compensation of employees" may also include the value of stock options received as income by corporate officers. Thus, it is argued, the accounts have to be substantially re-aggregated, to obtain a true picture of income generated and distributed in the economy. The problem there is that the detailed information to do it is often not made available, or is available only at a prohibitive cost.

US government statisticians admit frankly that "Unfortunately, the finance sector is one of the more poorly measured sectors in national accounts". The oddity of this is, that the finance sector nowadays dominates international transactions, and strongly influences the developmental path of the world economy. So, it is precisely the leading sector in the world economy for which systematic, comprehensive, and comparable data are not available.

Statisticians' criticisms

Statisticians have also criticized the validity of international statistical comparisons using national accounts data, on the ground that in the real world, the estimates are rarely compiled in a uniform way – despite appearances to the contrary.

For example, Jochen Hartwig provides evidence to show that "the divergence in growth rates [of real GDP] between the U.S. and the EU since 1997 can be explained almost entirely in terms of changes to deflation methods that have been introduced in the U.S. after 1997, but not – or only to a very limited extent – in Europe".

The "magic" of national accounts is that they provide an instant source of detailed international comparisons, but, critics argue, on closer inspection, the numbers are not really so comparable as they are made out to be. The effect is that all sorts of easy comparisons are tossed around by policy scientists which, if the technical story behind the numbers was told, would never be attempted because the comparisons are scientifically untenable (or at the very least rather dubious).

Both the strength and the weaknesses of national accounts are that they are based on an enormous variety of data sources. The strength consists in the fact that a lot of cross-checking between data sources and data sets can occur, to assess the credibility of the estimates. The weakness is that the sheer number of inferences made from different data sets used increases the possibility of data errors, and makes it more difficult to assess error margins.

The data quality has also often been criticized on the ground that what pretends to be "data" in reality often consists only of estimates extrapolated from mathematical models, not direct observations. These models are designed to predict what particular data values ought to be, based on sample data for "indicative trends". One can, for example, observe that if variables X, Y, and Z go up, then variable P will go up as well, in a specific proportionality. In that case, one may not need to survey P or its components directly, it is sufficient to get trend data for X, Y, and Z and feed them into a mathematical model which then predicts what the values for P will be at each interval of time.

Because statistical surveys are very costly or may be difficult to organize, or because the data has to be produced rapidly to meet a deadline, statisticians often try to find cheaper, quicker, and more efficient methods to produce the data, by means of inferences from data that they already have, or from selected data which they can get more easily.

But the objection to this approach - although it can sometimes be proved to provide accurate data successfully - is that there is a loss in data accuracy and data quality.

• The extrapolated estimates may lack any solid empirical basis, and the tendency is for fluctuations in the magnitudes of variables to be "smoothed out" by the estimation or interpolation procedure.
• Any unexpectedly large fluctuation in a variable is difficult to predict by a mathematical model since ultimately the model's descriptions assume the future trend will conform to the law of averages and the patterns of the past.
• Without adequate, comprehensive observational data from direct surveys, many of the statistical inferences made are simply not truly verifiable. All one can then say about the estimates is, that they are "probably fairly accurate, given previous and other concurrent data."

A typical reply of statisticians to this kind of objection is that although it is preferable to have comprehensive survey data available as a basis for estimation, and although data errors and inaccuracies do occur, it is possible to find techniques that keep the margins of error within acceptable bounds.

See also

• Capital formation
• China GDP – Dr. Fengbo Zhang introduced the Western economics, GDP, and SNA system to China, and replaced Soviet Union's MPS system.
• Compensation of employees
• European System of Accounts
• Gross fixed capital formation
• Human Development Index – an alternative way of measuring progress.
• Intermediate consumption
• Macroeconomics
• Material Product System
• Measures of national income and output
• National agencies responsible for GDP measurement
• National income and product accounts
• Productive and unproductive labour

其他

• *Paul Studenski, The Income of Nations; Theory, Measurement, and Analysis: Past and Present. New York: New York University Press, 1958.
• Andre Vanoli, A History of National Accounting, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2005
• Carol S. Carson, Jeanette Honsa, "The United Nations System of National Accounts: an introduction", in: Survey of Current Business, June 1990 [7] （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）
• CEC, IMF, OECD, UN & World Bank “System of National Accounts 1993” （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）. Commission of the European Communities-Eurostat, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations and World Bank, Brussels/Luxembourg, New York, Paris, Washington, 1993, xlix + 711 pp.
• EC, IMF, OECD, UN & World Bank “System of National Accounts 2008” （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）. European Commission, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations and World Bank, New York, Dec. 2009, 1993, lvi + 662 pp.
• The Review of Income and Wealth [8] （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）
• United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) “National Accounts" （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）.
• Zoltan Kenessey (Ed.), The Accounts of Nations, Amsterdam IOS, 1994.

外部鏈接

• UN.SNA.2008 （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆） manual in html5 with IDs, table-of-contents, and link-preview (html5.id.toc), non-official.