Institution

UNECE

Year

2008

Level

Intermediate

Abstract

This report discusses country practices in the coverage of the non-observed economy. The complete coverage of economic production is important in order to ensure good quality national accounts and exhaustive estimates of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A lot of attention is paid to the possibility of missing economic activities, which often suggests that the GDP figures published by national statistical offices exclude large parts of the economy. Achieving exhaustiveness requires a lot of work since it is difficult to account for certain types of productive activities that cannot be observed and measured directly by the official statisticians when the national accounts and GDP are compiled. The groups of activities that are often non-observed, in the sense of not being directly observed and measured, are those that are underground, illegal, informal or undertaken by households for their final use. Furthermore, some activities may be missed because of deficiencies in the basic data collection systems. These five groups of activities comprise the non-observed economy.