Page 115 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 6

CPS1839 Bahija Nali et al.

Measuring the hidden economy and improving
Moroccan GDP exhaustiveness through the labor
matrix
Bahija Nali, Yattou Ait Khellou
National accountants, HCP, Morocco

Abstract
GDP or gross domestic product is an economic aggregate that measures the
level of production and wealth achieved within a country or zone during a
given period, typically the year or quarter. It is an aggregate that is widely used
by national policy makers for the establishment of adequate economic
policies, and by international organization for international comparison
purposes. For this reason, national accountants are compelled to ensure the
exhaustiveness of the measurement of the various activities included in this
indicator according to the standards defined by the System of National
Accounts 2008 (2008 SNA). To achieve exhaustiveness, national accountants
must identify the entire productive universe and collect information on all
activities that fall within the production boundary. However, the character
extremely broad of this area, which is defined by the SNA, makes the task very
difficult. It recommends that all economic activities, irrespective of their nature:
formal or informal, legal or illegal and declared or unreported, be included in
national accounts estimates. The approach we are presenting is based on a
local reality, where the unregistered “activities” occupy an important place. In
such a context, embracing the entire productive space across production units
proves difficult, since these tend to conceal a part of their productions. We will
use labour input method which aims to approach the productive world
through the labour factor, which is the best known factor of production, as
reported by households in Labour Force Survey (LFS). Our work involves the
production of a Labour supply matrix (demographic matrix) to be confronted
with another matrix that represents the use of labour by employers (economic
matrix) to reach, finally, a unique matrix of labour input (jobs’ matrix), able to
put production in relation with the workforce that gave birth to it. The
objective is to capture the employed population not observed or not traced
by economic surveys and to assign an output to it.

Keyword
exhaustiveness of national accounts; hidden economy; supply and demand of
labour; labour productivity by industry

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