Economics—Macroeconomic Accounts
Macroeconomic accounts is economics jargon for the set of statistics that describe aspects of the overall functioning of an economy. Macroeconomic accounts are often called “national accounts,” but it is possible to create macroeconomic accounts for units other than nations, such as individual U.S. states or sectors of the economy. Gross domestic product (GDP) may be the most familiar macroeconomic accounts statistic, but there are many others.
Major Sources: United States
Bureau of Economic Analysis (U.S. Department of Commerce)
In the United States, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (www.bea.gov) is the primary source for macroeconomic accounts data. One of two major federal statistical agencies within the U.S. Department of Commerce (the other being the Census Bureau), the Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes four types of macroeconomic accounts data: national income and product accounts (GDP; income, spending and saving by individuals; profits of corporations; value of equipment, durable goods, and other assets owned by businesses and consumers; etc.), industry accounts (inputs, output, and value-added by industry), regional accounts (GDP, personal income, and employment data, total or by industry, for states and metropolitan areas), and international accounts (imports, exports, balance of payments, etc.). Long time series are available for much of this data. Data on the amount of money invested in various categories of “fixed assets” (machinery, buildings, etc.) is available from 1901, for example, GDP is available from 1929, detailed consumer spending data is available from 1959, and much of the international accounts data is available from 1960. An interactive data interface makes it relatively easy to find, visualize, and download the data.
Major Sources: World
United Nations Statistics Division
The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) has a section devoted entirely to national accounts data (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/). It operates the National Accounts Main Aggregates, which contains GDP, gross national income (GNI), and value-added data for both countries and the major regions of the world. Although the UNSD has been collecting and publishing national accounts data in print since the 1950s, only the data from 1970 to present is freely available in the online database.
Minor Sources
Penn World Table
The Penn World Table (www.rug.nl/research/ggdc/data/penn-world-table) takes GDP, population, and exchange rate data from other sources and uses it to create purchasing-power-parity (PPP) adjusted estimates of GDP and its components for nearly all of the countries of the world, 1950 to present, with a lag of about two years. The Penn World Table was produced at the University of Pennsylvania for more than thirty years, but starting with version 8.0 it moved to new institutional hosts, the University of California–Davis and Groningen University (The Netherlands).
For estimates of national accounts data before 1950, one source is the Maddison Project (www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm). The Project is named after the economic historian Angus Maddison, who spent much of his career trying to create estimates for GDP and economic growth for places and times when accurate GDP accounting was not available. The Project website distributes Maddison’s data set, updated to reflect new information that has come to light since Maddison’s death in 2010. It is important to be aware, when using this data, that these estimates have varying degrees of accuracy; savvy users should read the accompanying documentation for information about the sources used to create the estimates for different countries or time periods.
World Bank
Much national accounts data is also available via the World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org; see chapter 2). Although the World Bank Data site shows data only back to 1980 in the online user interface, the data downloads sometimes include additional historical data. In some instances, this can allow access to GDP and other national accounts data prior to the years made freely available online by UNSD.