High Level Forum on the Long Term Development of the SNA Criteria for setting priorities for the SNA

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High Level Forum on the Long Term Development of
the SNACriteria for setting priorities for the
SNA research agenda

• 17-18 November 2008
• World Bank, Washington DC
• Joe Grice
• Executive Director, Economic, Labour Market and
  Social Analysis, Office for National Statistics

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Prioritisation as the Name of the Game

• Not difficult to write down huge numbers of
  issues
• Prioritisation therefore essential
• Rational approach to compare costs and benefits
• Well developed approach - not least for
  statistical work programmes
• But may need adaption for SNA research purposes

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User Needs

• National accounts not for their own sake but
  because they are useful
• Full regard to user needs thus essential
• and all the more so given resource constraints
• But user needs have number of dimensions

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Competing Dimensions of User Needs(1)

• Historical motivation for National Accounts
• - as a tool for economic management
• -as a measure of welfare
• Both link to key current agendas
• 2) Economic demand management versus economic
  supply and growth
• Both are of concern to economic agents and policy
  makers

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Competing Dimensions of User Needs(2)

• 3) Macroeconomic needs versus microanalysis
• Some legitimate concerns centre on the main
  aggregates. Others on the supporting detail
• 4) Improving quality versus extending
  applications
• Do we put effort into dealing with known
  weaknesses eg better measurement of quality of
  services improving treatment of capital
  services? Or extensions eg more on informal
  economy or environmental outputs?

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Feasibility and Costs

• The other side of the scissors
• Whatever the potential benefits, how likely are
  they to be realised
• How difficult is the research topic? Is it likely
  to be expensive to resolve?
• Practicability. If the research topic does look
  tractable, are NSIs likely to be able to make the
  results operational eg are any required data
  sources likely to be widely available? Are NSIs
  likely to be able to take the research findings
  on board in a reasonable timeframe?

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Breadth of Potential Usage

• SNA an international standard (obviously!)
• So natural to ask could research results be
  widely taken up across most countries
• Good cross check but not necessarily decisive.
  Many ways to handle development of research
  conclusions during transitional phase eg
  satellite accounts off line analysis

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Summary (1)

• The research agenda should be more than the
  cumulative sum of issues arising over time
• Application of cost benefit analysis looks like
  a good potential gatekeeper/ prioritisation tool
• Previous slides summarise some of the dimensions
  to be taken into account

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Summary (2)

• Further work would be needed to turn these
  considerations into a practical decision-making
  tool
• Eg how to weight claims of competing
  beneficiaries and of expected benefits
• But no more difficult to do this than in emerging
  practice in constructing statistical work
  programmes. Or, increasingly, the way other
  research programmes are determined.

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