National Accounts by Institutional Sectors, NA-IS. Methodology and Results 2005 - 2011 q1

This document presents the methodology and results of project “National Accounts by Institutional Sectors” (NA-IS) at quarterly frequency, launched in 2008 and developed within the framework of the Systems of National Accounts and as part of an action plan for closing statistics gaps proposed by international financial institutions —including the IMF, OECD and BIS— after the recent international financial crisis. The NA-IS show a complete activity cycle of an institutional sector, moving from production to the generation and use of income for consumption or savings, capital transactions and, finally, acquisitions of financial assets and liabilities in detail financial instruments and counterpart sector. The NA-IS offer also financial statementswhich include stocks of financial assets and liabilities, revaluations and other changes in assets accounts that reconcile the operations with changes in the balance sheets. These results are valuable in the macroeconomic analysis of the various institutional sectors, from both a real and a financial perspective.

Re-theorising the core: a ‘globalized’ business elite in Santiago, Chile

World systems theory continues to be a widely adopted approach in theorisations of the contemporary world economy. An important epistemological component to world systems theory is the metaphor of core-periphery. Recent work within the approach has sought to transcend earlier criticisms of regional conceptions of cores, peripheries and semi-peripheries by an increasing sensitivity to local differences and an increasing emphasis on Wallerstein's original idea of core-periphery as process, operating at all scales in the contemporary world system. However, this paper argues that the core-periphery metaphor currently used by world systems theorists is founded around a restrictively narrow spatial epistemology. Such a narrow epistemology implements the core-periphery metaphor only as something which produces territorial outcomes in the physical world. This paper contends that recent work within the social services, concerned with the globalization debate and issues of spatial epistemology, should inform world systems theory in producing a reformulated spatial understanding of the core-periphery metaphor, embodying a wider conception of space to include abstract social spaces. This argument is developed in the notion that the world economy must also be understood as having a ‘social core’: a transnational diasporic business elite exercising decision-making power over the capitalist world system. The contention is grounded in the presentation of research into a case study of such a ‘globalized’ business elite in the capital city of Chile, Santiago