Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts for the United States: Draft SNA-USA

Abstract

This paper presents integrated macroeconomic accounts for the United States for the period 1985 to 2002 and discusses issues related to their construction and use. Specifically, it focuses on tying together the national income and product accounts (NIPAs) and international transaction accounts (ITA) published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the flow of funds accounts (FFA) published by the Federal Reserve Board. The paper provides integrated accounts for seven sectors: households and nonprofit organizations serving households, nonfinancial non-corporate businesses, nonfinancial corporate businesses, financial businesses, federal government, state and local governments, and the rest of the world. Each sector table has a full complement of accounts: current accounts (production and income accounts), accumulation accounts (capital account, financial account, and other changes in volume account), revaluation account, and balance sheet account. As a result, the sector statements trace the factors leading to changes in sector net worth. Relative to current publications of the two agencies, the tables go quite a bit further toward providing for the United States the sequence of accounts suggested in the System of National Accounts 1993 (SNA93), the recognized international standard. The tables use official data as of June 10, 2004; however, a few series have been created by the authors, and they are unofficial preliminary estimates at this time.