Abstract
What appear to be merely technical choices in statistics are in fact often of profound importance, because published data mould our perception of reality. We cannot, with our own eyes and ears, perceive more than a minute sample of human affairs, even in our own country — and a very unrandom sample at that. So we rely on published statistics not merely for professional or political (or commercial) purposes, but in order to build and maintain our model of the world.
I owe a great deal of the ideas in this paper to discussions with, and papers by, Kari Levitt and Osvaldo Sunkel. I have also greatly benefited by help from colleagues in IDS and ODM, too numerous to mention, though perhaps I should make an exception for Hans Singer. It was through him I was drawn into the ILO’s World Employment Programme country missions. These developed a new way of approaching development problems, to which Hans has also of course contributed directly. This paper could be considered as a first step to working out the implications of this approach for statistical policy.
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Notes
N. Kaldor, ‘The quantitative aspects of the full employment problem in Britain’, in W. H. Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society (Allen & Unwin, 1944) Appendix C, pp. 344–401.
See G. Stuvel, ‘The production boundary in national accounting’, Development and Change, Vo. IV no. 2 (1972–3) pp. 4–14.
But note Sir John Hicks’s sharp comment: ‘It is the business of the theoretical economist to be able to criticise the practice of [the income tax] authorities: he has no right to be found in their company himself (J. R. Hicks, Value and Capital (OUP, 2nd ed. 1946) p. 180 n. 1).
Derek W. Blades, ‘Non-monetary (subsistence) activities in the national accounts of developing countries’ (OECD Development Centre, mimeo, June 1974, presented to the Study Session on Specific National Accounts Problems in Developing Countries, CD/EDS(74)47). This suggests omitting barter trade on the ground that it appears relatively unimportant. But in South Asia, for example, itinerant monks who exchange religious services for rice appear numerous, even to the casual observer.
Even in India, despite the labours of the National Sample Survey and of district agricultural and fiscal officers, only about half the national income is covered by primary data, according to J. N. Tewari (‘Data base for the Fifth Plan’, Economic and Political Weekly (26 Jan 1974) p. 103). The same is true for Sri Lanka according to A. Shourie in a paper on ‘Sri Lanka’s National Accounts’ (Marga, Vol. 2 no. 3 (1974)), sardonically subtitled ‘Notes for the regression enthusiast’. Shourie adds that for about 15 per cent of GDP (22 per cent in the service sectors), estimates are derived from assumed trends, e.g. that value added at current prices grows at the same rate as the population (p. 22) As he points out, the estimate of investment (and thus of savings) becomes very sensitive to exchange rate fluctuations, on either basis (pp. 25–6). Moreover, ‘the time series enthusiast may well find himself regressing a variable on another variable from which the former was estimated in the first place’, so what appears to be an economic coefficient is no more than a measure of the consistency in statistical procedures (p. 28).
‘Service Activities in Developing Countries’ by Derek W. Blades, Derek D. Johnston and Witold Marczewski (OECD Development Centre, mimeo 1974) ch. III. In Sri Lanka, the Central Bank estimates value added in construction for each year at 4.47 times the value of imported and domestically produced materials and not surprisingly obtains figures entirely different from the Department of Census and Statistics, which estimates public construction directly (Shourie, op. cit., p. 24).
This corresponds to the framework of analysis in the report of the ILO mission to Kenya led by Hans Singer and Richard Jolly Employment, Income and Equality (1972). The approach of Sunkel in ‘External Economic Relations and the Process of Development: a Latin-American view’ (mimeo, 1973, reprinted in
R. B. Williamson, W. P. Glade Jr., and K. M. Schmitt (eds), Latin American-US economic interactions: conflict, accommodation and policies for the future (Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974). pp. 27–39) is similar, except that he does not distinguish between ‘marginal’ and ‘traditional’. The official national accounts of Malawi have also taken a somewhat similar shape — see
S. J. Webster, ‘Problems of determining and measuring the reliability of national accounts in developing countries, Income and Wealth, series XX no. 1 (March 1974), p. 45. A number of African governments publish separate estimates for subsistence production. The group working on the new series for Trinidad under Kari Levitt, has produced accounts not only for the foreign-controlled economy but divided this in turn between the two parts orientated to export and domestic markets respectively, with separate treatment of petroleum and sugar (however, understandably in view of the structure of Trinidad, no distinction is made between modern and traditional, or rural and urban).
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© 1976 Alec Cairncross and Mohinder Puri
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Seers, D. (1976). The Political Economy of National Accounting. In: Cairncross, A., Puri, M. (eds) Employment, Income Distribution and Development Strategy: Problems of the Developing Countries. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81529-6_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81529-6_14
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