High Level Forum on the Long
Term Development of the SNA
“Criteria for setting priorities for
the SNA research agenda”
17-18 November 2008
World Bank, Washington DC
Joe Grice
Executive Director, Economic, Labour
Market and Social Analysis, Office for
National Statistics
Prioritisation as the Name of the
Game
• Not difficult to write down huge numbers of
issues
• Prioritisation therefore essential
• Rational approach to compare costs and
benefits
• Well developed approach - not least for
statistical work programmes
• But may need adaption for SNA research
purposes
User Needs
• National accounts not for their own sake
but because they are useful
• Full regard to user needs thus essential…
• … and all the more so given resource
constraints
• But user needs have number of
dimensions
Competing Dimensions of User
Needs(1)
1) Historical motivation for National
Accounts:
- as a tool for economic management
-as a measure of welfare
Both link to key current agendas
2) Economic demand management versus
economic supply and growth
Both are of concern to economic agents and policy makers
Competing Dimensions of User
Needs(2)
3) Macroeconomic needs versus
microanalysis
Some legitimate concerns centre on the main aggregates.
Others on the supporting detail
4) Improving quality versus extending
applications
Do we put effort into dealing with known weaknesses eg
better measurement of quality of services; improving
treatment of capital services? Or extensions eg more on
informal economy; or environmental outputs?
Feasibility and Costs
• The other side of the scissors
• Whatever the potential benefits, how likely are
they to be realised:
– How difficult is the research topic? Is it likely to be
expensive to resolve?
– Practicability. If the research topic does look tractable,
are NSIs likely to be able to make the results
operational eg are any required data sources likely to
be widely available? Are NSIs likely to be able to take
the research findings on board in a reasonable
timeframe?
Breadth of Potential Usage
• SNA an international standard (obviously!)
• So natural to ask could research results be
widely taken up across most countries
• Good cross check but not necessarily
decisive. Many ways to handle
development of research conclusions
during transitional phase eg satellite
accounts; off line analysis
Summary (1)
• The research agenda should be more than
the cumulative sum of issues arising over
time
• Application of cost benefit analysis looks
like a good potential gatekeeper/
prioritisation tool
• Previous slides summarise some of the
dimensions to be taken into account
Summary (2)
•
Further work would be needed to turn these
considerations into a practical decision-making
tool
–
•
Eg how to weight claims of competing beneficiaries
and of expected benefits
But no more difficult to do this than in
emerging practice in constructing statistical
work programmes. Or, increasingly, the way
other research programmes are determined.