System of national accounts. The ratio of indicators in the system of national accounts

The system of national accounts and the history of its creation

The main absolute macroeconomic indicators are contained in the system of national accounts. The system of national accounts (its full name is the System of National Product and Income Accounts System) was developed in the late 20s by a group of American scientists, employees of the National Bureau of Economic Research (National Bureau of Economic Research), under the guidance of the future Nobel Prize winner Simon Kuznets.

Attempts to develop a system of macroeconomic indicators that allow assessing the state of the national economy began in various countries as early as the First World War in order to assess the military and economic potential of the warring powers. They were further developed in the mid-1920s during the period of rapid growth in the economies of developed countries (the so-called prosperity period) with the aim of predicting future economic development trends. Moreover, the studies were conducted not only in a private organization specially created in the USA in the early 20s - the National Bureau of Economic Research, where this work was headed by well-known American economist Wesley Claire Mitchell, who studied the problems of the business cycle, which is impossible in the absence of a system of macroeconomic indicators.

In parallel, work in this direction was carried out in Soviet Russia at the All-Russian (and later All-Union) Council of National Economy - the Supreme Economic Council - in connection with the need to develop five-year plans for the development of the country's economy, as well as to assess the trends of the global economy and the prospects for the world revolution. In October 1929, a collapse erupted on the New York Stock Exchange, which marked the beginning of the deepest and most prolonged global economic crisis - the Great Collapse or the Great Depression of 1929-1933. In early 1930, the US Congress passed a resolution on the need to develop a system of indicators (indicators) that would allow to assess the state of the American economy. Practically, such a system has already been created. After the Second World War, most countries, in accordance with the recommendations of the United Nations, began to use the methodology for calculating macroeconomic indicators laid down in the System of National Accounts, which makes it possible to make macroeconomic comparisons for different countries of the world. Russia (USSR) began to use this technique since 1987.

The system of national accounts is a set of statistical macroeconomic indicators characterizing the size of the total product (output) and total income, allowing to assess the state of the national economy. The SNA contains three main indicators of total output (output): gross national product (GNP); gross domestic product (GDP); net national product (NNP) and three indicators of total income: national income (ND); personal income (LD); disposable personal income (RLD).

Until the beginning of the 80s, the main indicator characterizing the total volume of production was the indicator of gross national product. However, in modern conditions due to the internationalization of economic and economic relations and difficulties in calculating the gross national product (GNP), since the national factors of production of each country are used in many other countries of the world, the gross domestic product (GDP) has become the main indicator of total output.

The ratio of indicators in the system of national accounts

As already noted, the main indicators in the SNA are three indicators of the total product: gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), net national product (NNP) and three indicators of total income: national income (ND), personal income (LD ) disposable personal income (RLD).

The substantial difference between GDP (Gross Domestic Product - GNP) and GNP (Gross National Product - GDP) has already been considered earlier. The value of GNP differs from the value of GDP by the value of net factor income (FFD):

GNP = GDP + PFD

Respectively,

GDP = GNP - PFD

The value of net factor income represents the difference between the income received by citizens (residents) of a given country on their own (national) factors of production in other countries and income received by foreigners (non-residents) on their own (foreign) factors of production in a given country. This difference can be either a positive value (if citizens of a given country received more income in other countries than foreigners in a given country, and in this case, the GNP is greater than GDP), or a negative value (if foreign citizens received more than citizens of this country received incomes abroad, then GDP is more than GNP).

As for the Net National Product (NNP), in contrast to the GNP, which characterizes the national volume of production, this indicator characterizes the production potential of the economy, since it includes only net investment and does not include recovery investment (depreciation). Therefore, in order to obtain a NNP, depreciation should be subtracted from the GNP: NNP = GNP - A. The NNP can be calculated both by expenditure and by income.

NNP expenditure = consumer spending (C) + net investment expenditure (I net) + government procurement (G) + net export (Xn)

NNP income = wages + rent + interest payments + incomes of owners + corporate profits + indirect taxes

National Income (NI) is the total income earned by the owners of economic resources, i.e. the amount of factor income. You can get it: a) or, if you deduct indirect taxes from the NNP: ND = NNP - indirect taxes; b) or, if we sum up all the factor incomes:

ND = wages + rent + interest payments + incomes of owners + corporate profits

Personal income (Personal Income - PI), in contrast to national income, is the total income received by the owners of economic resources. To calculate the LD, it is necessary to deduct from the ND everything that is not available to households, i.e. is part of the collective, not personal income, and add everything that increases their income, but is not included in the ND:

LD = ND - social insurance contributions - corporate income tax - retained earnings of corporations + transfers + interest on government bonds

or

LD = ND - social insurance contributions - corporate profits + dividends + transfers + interest on government bonds

The third type of total income - disposable personal income (DPI) - is the income used, i.e. owned by households. It is less than personal income by the amount of individual taxes that owners of economic resources must pay in the form of direct (first of all, income) taxes:

РЛД = ЛД - individual taxes

RLD = C + S

There are the following types of savings:

1. personal savings or household savings, which can be calculated as the difference between disposable personal income and personal consumption expenditures:

   S personal = RLD - S;

2. business savings (savings of business), including depreciation and retained earnings of corporations, which serve as internal sources of financing and the basis for the expansion of production;
3. private savings, i.e. private sector savings consisting of household savings and firms' savings, i.e. The amount of personal savings and business savings:

   S private = S personal + S business;

4. government savings (government savings), which take place in the case of a surplus (surplus) of the state budget, when budget revenues exceed expenditures.

   S government = budget revenues - budget expenditures> 0.

   The state budget revenues include all tax revenues, profits of state enterprises, privatization revenues, etc .:

   Budget revenues = individual taxes + corporate income tax + indirect business taxes + social insurance premiums + state enterprises' profits + privatization revenues Budget expenditures = government purchases of goods and services + transfers + interest on government bonds.

   Budget balance = budget revenues - budget expenditures

5. national savings, which are the sum of private savings and public savings:

   S national = S private + S government

6. Foreign sector savings occur in the event of a deficit (negative balance) in the trade balance of a given country when imports exceed exports, i.e. net exports are negative. This means that the income of the foreign sector from the sale of its goods and services to a given country (for a given country is the cost of imports) exceeds the cost of purchasing goods and services of a given country (for it is the income from exports):

   S foreign = Im - Ex> 0

   The total savings of all sectors (private, public and foreign) is equal to the total investment

   I = S private + S government + S foreign = S + (T - G) + (Im - Ex)

Notes. Sometimes in SNA tasks it is required to determine the amount of seizures and injections. It should be borne in mind that exemptions include: private savings, including personal savings and business savings; all types of taxes, including social insurance contributions; import; Injections include: net investment costs, government purchases of goods and services, dividends, transfers, interest on government bonds, exports.

SNA indicators quantify the total product and total income, but they do not reflect the quality of life, welfare, which grow more slowly than GDP and ND, which do not take into account the negative effects of the scientific and technological revolution and economic growth. To characterize the level of well-being, as a rule, such indicators are used as a) the value of per capita GDP (GDP per capita), i.e. GDP / population of the country; or b) national income per capita (NI per capita), i.e. ND / population of the country. To ensure cross-country comparisons, these figures are calculated in US dollars.

However, these indicators are very imperfect and are not able to accurately reflect the quality of life. Their main disadvantages are that:

1. they are averaged (if one person has two cars, and the other has none, then on average, each has one car);
2. they do not take into account many qualitative characteristics of the level of well-being (two countries with the same ND per capita may have different levels of education, life expectancy, morbidity and mortality, crime rates, etc.);
3. they ignore the different purchasing power of the dollar in different countries (for 1 dollar in the USA and, for example, in India you can buy different quantities of goods);
4. they do not take into account the negative effects of economic growth (the degree of pollution of the environment, noise, gas pollution, etc.).

In order to better assess the level of well-being in 1972, two American economists — Nobel Prize laureate James Tobin and William Nordhaus (co-author of Nobel Prize laureate Paul Samuelson in writing the world-famous economics textbook) proposed a methodology for calculating an indicator called “Net Economic Welfare” (Net Economic Welfare). This indicator includes the valuation of everything that improves well-being, but is not taken into account in the value of goods (for example, the amount of free time to increase the level of education, parenting, self-improvement; work for yourself; improve the level and quality of medical care, reduction of environmental pollution, etc.).

But when calculating this indicator, the value of all that worsens the quality of life is deducted from GDP, and reduces the level of well-being (value of bads), (for example, morbidity and mortality, quality of education, life expectancy, crime rate, environmental pollution, negative the consequences of urbanization, etc.).