Page 155 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS195 Gabriel Quirós-Romero et al.
It has been over ten years since the adoption of the 2008 System of National
Accounts (SNA) and the IMF’s 6th edition Balance of Payments and
International Investment Position Manual (BPM6) and economic systems have
continued to evolve. The IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Manual (GFS
2014) and the Monetary and Financial Statistics Manual and Compilation
Guide (MFS 2016) were updated more recently. There are good reasons for
maintaining separate manuals across specific topical domains (e.g. MFS meets
the data needs for monetary statistics) but demands from the user community
to have consistent statistics across domains and statistical compilers to have
consistent guidance point towards a harmonized conceptual approach to
standard setting. Thus, an overarching goal is to maintain the theoretical
linkages across macroeconomic statistics while maintaining separate manuals.
While the current conceptual frameworks of national accounts (SNA) and
international accounts (BPM6) are harmonized, robust, resilient and still
relevant, it is also clear that globalization, digitalization, economic welfare,
“gig” employment, or the informal economy provide significant challenges,
especially in the case where the issues become entangled. Concerns have
arisen over how these issues are being addressed both from a conceptual and
a practical measurement perspective.
The IMF Statistics Department’s (STA) mandate is to provide global
leadership on statistical methodologies and standards for the Fund, its
member countries, and the international statistical community, as well as
strengthen member countries’ capabilities to produce and disseminate
macroeconomic and financial statistics through technical assistance and
capacity development. STA’s challenge is to provide guidance to a wide range
of countries with very different economic structures and statistical systems,
making the aspiration of one-statistical-standard-fits-all particularly difficult
to implement. Therefore, a balance must be struck between methodology and
statistical capacity in the IMF membership especially for less statistically
advanced countries. This paper is organized by first providing some necessary
reflections to consider before changing the international standards, then
discusses main priority issues and recent progress.

2. Some initial reflections
The national and international accounts are a system of accounts that are
interlinked, comprehensive, consistent, and integrated. Changes to one
component may have implications that ripple throughout the fundamental
principles, e.g. residence (territory), production boundary, asset boundary, as
well as the “core”, of the entire system of accounts. For an orderly discussion,
it is convenient to sort issues by the complexity of the potential solutions.
Hence, we propose first to reflect on whether the issue can be remedied by (i)
just clarifying the recording of the new phenomena and/or providing more

142 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9