Annual national accounts (2000 Base)
The origins of the national accounts date back to the interwar period: the aim at that time was to construct an index that would give an evaluation of the wealth produced each year and show how it was developing. In France, the national accounts developed much more in the 1950s, to cope with national requirements for planning and economic budgets.
What we now call the GDP (gross domestic product) can be evaluated in 3 ways: by taking the sum of produced goods and the resulting value added (production approach), by taking the sum of their uses (demand approach), or by adding incomes together (income approach). However, the practical difficulties encountered when trying to reconcile these three approaches meant that it quickly became necessary to look for consistency at a much finer level of detail.
The national accounts describe resources and uses at a very fine level of detail for each type of good or service. To be used in the accounts, a good (or service) must have been produced or imported. Production is the main source of income: it refers both to human activity which enables goods to be manufactured or services to be provided and the result of this activity.
However, the field also has to be specified; a good or a service that has been produced can then be sold for export, consumed, invested, stored, destroyed or incorporated into the production process of another good or service. Some products are invested, stored or consumed by their producer; if products of the same nature give rise to exchanges, then this production and these uses are of interest to national accounts. Lastly, national accounts are interested in the production of public services (defence, justice) where use cannot be divided between various actors.
National accounts classify the various protagonists of economic life into institutional sectors and describe their activities and interrelationships. In concrete terms, the resident units, i.e. actors whose main activity is carried out within the economic territory, are grouped together into institutional sectors: Non-financial companies, Households, General government, etc.
By combining successive accounts, the integrated economic accounts (TEE) describe production in each sector, the value added generated, income distribution, redistributions operated by taxation and transfers, distribution of disposable income between consumption and savings, net lending or net borrowing resulting from the difference between savings and direct investment, and changes in assets which are the result of savings and changes in the price of assets. The Rest of the world account, from the standpoint of the Rest of the world, registers operations between resident units and those outside the economic territory.
All values in national accounts are evaluated "in value", i.e. in euros at the current rate. Exchanges are evaluated using prices that are actually charged. However, the price received by the producer is not the same as that paid by the purchaser; to pass from one to the other, the good (or service) has to be transported and marketed by intermediaries who take off profit. They are usually subject to tax on these products (e.g. VAT, domestic duty on petroleum products (TIPP)) and sometimes receive subsidies.
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Synthesis
Annual