| Description | Internationally agreed standard set of recommendations on how to compile measures of economic activity in accordance with strict accounting conventions based on economic principles. The recommendations are expressed in terms of a set of universally valid concepts, definitions, classifications and accounting rules.
The main objective of the SNA is to provide a comprehensive conceptual and accounting framework that can be used to create a macroeconomic database suitable for analysing and evaluating the performance of an economy. The SNA has a very important statistical function by serving as a coordinating framework for economic statistics in two different senses. In the first place, the SNA is seen as the conceptual framework for ensuring the consistency of the definitions and classifications used in different, but related, fields of statistics. Secondly, the SNA acts as an accounting framework to ensure the numerical consistency of data drawn from different sources. The framework of the SNA provides accounts that are comprehensive, consistent and integrated.
The SNA measures what takes place in the economy, between which agents, and for what purpose. The accounts of the SNA provide more than a snapshot of the economy at a point in time, since in practice the accounts are compiled for a succession of time periods and at different levels of aggregation. |