Papers related to the 14th conference - Association de Comptabilité Nationale

Wednesday, June 6, 2012, from 10 am to 1 pm.

Organizer: Jacques Bournay, ACN

Chair: André Vanoli, ACN

The building of long time series is one of the aims of the national accounts, although the short term constraints often assign them a low priority. Yet they are essential for economic analysis and modeling. The session will start with some thoughts about history and economic statistics, and very long time series. Two visions will be proposed : that of an historian specialised in quantitative history and that of a national accountant who questions the adequacy of current frameworks to a more distant past. The session will continue with two examples of analysis over a long period: Comparison of the crisis of the 1930s with the 2000s, and long-term evolution of income and wealth.

The theoretical and practical problems of the "retropolations" (back-casting) of the French national accounts, which should have been logically presented in this session 1, will be postponed to Thursday, June 7 at 9:30 am before the begining of the session 3.

Jean-Charles Asselain, emeritus professor at University of Bordeaux IV

Anne Harrison, emeritus national accountant and University of Edinburgh

Gilbert Cette, Banque de France and Universite de la Mediterranee, Yusuf Kocoglu, University of South, Toulon and Jacques Mairesse, INSEE-CREST

Johara Khelif, Insee

Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics

This last part of session 1 has not presented at the conference.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012, from 2:30 pm to 6 pm.

Organizers: Dominique Durant, Banque de France, autorité de contrôle prudentiel et Franck Sédillot, Banque de France, direction général des statistiques

Chair: Pierre Sicsic, Banque de France - Direction générale des études

The harmonized framework of national accounts, together with the balance of payments framework, naturally fits with the description and analysis of globalization. However, for a more accurate analysis, supplementary detailed information is required. That is a real challenge for statisticians.

On the financial side, huge imbalances between savings and investments of the main geographical areas changed the repartition of assets and liabilities. Once emerging countries, have become net investors in more advanced countries. These imbalances, which provoked admiration until the mid 2000, have proven to be unsustainable with the crisis that shakes globalized finance.

To obtain a view of financial commitment that would be at the same time synthetic and oriented from investors to debtors, we need who-to-whom between countries, and even cross-section between sectors and countries. From this point of view, balance of payments especially improved: security-by-security reporting from custodians joined with security referentials greatly enhanced the direct investment and portfolio statistics, as well as the information about groups of companies. However, the identification of risks still stumbles of reallocation of risks coming from derivatives and the complex structures of international groups.

Regarding trade of goods and services, a precise analysis of the operations shows the changing position of countries on the globalized production chain. International comparisons of trade in value-added statistics realised by the OECD gives very interesting insight. The analysis of China shows the effects of a strategic positioning in the chain of trade.

Anton Brender, Associate professor at Paris Dauphine University and director of Economic Studies at Dexia Asset Management

Bruno Longet, service de la balance des paiements à la Banque de France

Nadim Ahmad, Sebastien Miroudot, Norihiko Yamano, OECD, Trade and productivity section

Francoise Lemoine, Centre d'Études Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII)

Thursday, June 7 from 10 am to 1 pm.

Organizer: Ronan Mahieu, INSEE

Chair: Jean-Marc Béguin, INSEE

National accounts are largely based on business statistics for the development of data on the productive system. These statistics have had recently two major changes:

The session will shed light on these two basic trends affecting business statistics, and thereby the national accounts.

Philippe Brion, INSEE

Pierre Teillet, INSEE

Vincent Hecquet, INSEE

Thursday, June 7, 2012, from 2:30 pm to 6 pm.

Organizer: Fabrice Lenglart, INSEE

Chair: Peter Van de Ven, OCDE

The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission presented in September 2009 a report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress. In this report, the Committee began development paths for official statistics and in particular for national accounts. These recommendations and the associated early works were presented at the previous conference of the ACN in June 2010.

Two years later, this session aims to take stock of the new advances with emphasis on the household perspective. On this theme, the report recommended to enhance the existing indicators in national accounts, but also to give more importance to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth. It also suggested expanding the income measures to non-market activities.

The papers in this session focus therefore to present an overview of the theoretical reflections conducted and / or advances from a practical point of view on these issues.

Sébastien Durier, INSEE, Lucile Richet-Mastain, INSEE

Delphine Roy, INSEE

Maryse Fesseau, OECD, Maria-Liviana Mattonetti, Eurostat, Florence Wolff, OECD

Denis Leythienne, EUROSTAT

Friday, June 8, 2012, from 9:30 am to 1 pm.

Organizer: Paul Schreyer, OECD

Chair: Myriam Linster, chef de la section Information et Indicateurs environnementaux à l’OCDE

National accounts are often criticized for not taking sufficient account of interactions between the economy and the environment - in particular, services that the environment makes to the economy are recognized only very partially. This leads to an underestimation of the dependence of economic activity to the natural environment and can lead to erroneous policy measures. A new international accounting standard, the SEEA (for "System of Environmental - Economic Accounts"), has been recently adopted by the United Nations. It aims to complete the framework of national accounting to better reflect the interactions between the economy and the environment.

The first objective of this session is to discuss these new accounting standards and explore their statistical implementation. A second objective is to understand how are analyzed in the accounting framework certain social issues inextricably linked with environmental issues. Further work linking patterns of consumption and CO2 intensity with the level of household income are a good example of this type. The papers of the session will focus on theoretical considerations and present examples of practical implementation.

André Vanoli, ACN

Prabodh Pourouchottamin, EDF R&D

Jean-Louis Weber, Economic-Environmental Accounting, European Environment Agency

Frédéric Nauroy, Commissariat général au Développement durable, CGDD-SOeS