Page 162 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS195 Gabriel Quirós-Romero et al.
distributed. Further work on linking households’ indicators from sectoral
accounts, micro data and macro aggregates should be high for national and
international statistical agencies.
In addition, while the SNA provides a brief general discussion of real
income reflecting the real purchasing power, it is not prescriptive of what types
of income measures would be needed to appropriately measure economic
welfare. In this respect, a discussion on real household (adjusted) disposable
income as being a more appropriate measure of household’s economic well-
being instead of real GDP could be emphasized to gain traction in countries
that do not publish income measures. Furthermore, the SNA could be more
prescriptive on the choice of deflator, emphasizing that the appropriate
measure of real income would use a deflator containing prices for the uses of
that income rather than from the sources of the income.

6. Informal economy
The informal economy broadly defined should comprise (i) the production
of goods and market services of households; and (ii) the activities of
corporations (illegal; underground) that may not be covered in the regular
data collection framework for compiling macroeconomic statistics.
Furthermore, the gig economy, facilitated by digitalization, has given a new
meaning to the concept of informality in the economy, but also may provide
scope for better measuring these activities using big data. The current
statistical manuals, 2008 SNA and BPM6, fall short in providing a clear
definition that is suitable for compiling the requisite statistics for policy
analysis; therefore, more clarification in the international standards may be
needed. To make progress on this issue, the 7th IMF Statistical forum in
November 2019, will focus on estimation methods by identifying good,
feasible, traditional compilation methods as well as innovative data sources
from big data to the use of drones–used to measure agriculture and
construction activity– to better measure the informal economy.

7. Discussion and Conclusion
A considerable number of current statistical challenges may be satisfied by
providing more granular or supplementary information, allowing the flexibility
needed. Overall, the basic structure of the current international statistical
standards remains valid and there is no need to propose major changes to the
core macroeconomic statistics framework. Furthermore, given that many
8
countries have not yet adopted the 2008 SNA and are unable to comply with
the minimum required scope and detail of national accounts data, it is,

8 Only 88 countries had adopted the 2008 SNA by December 2018.
https://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/50thsession/documents/2019-8-NationalAccounts-E.pdf
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