Abstract
National accounting, Wilfred Beckerman has written in a standard introduction to the topic, is simply a systematic way of classifying the multitude of economic activities that take place in the economy in different groups or classes that arc regarded as being important for understanding the way the economy works (Beckerman, 1968, p. 68). Beckerman acknowledges that there is an arbitrary-element in many of the decisions that have to be made in drawing up a classification system for the National Accounts, and he is at pains to stress that there is nothing sacrosanct about the present way the accounts are structured: It must be emphasised that there is a constant evolution and change in the questions the economists are asking, in the institutional structure of the economy, and in the working hypotheses that economists use for purposes of analysing the behaviour of the economy. In accordance with these changes, so it will be necessary to modify and adapt the classification system used for national accounting. It would be useless to persist with a classification system, for example, that no longer corresponded to the institutional and social categories of society, or to the latest knowledge about how the economy operated and so about which relationships were important for analytical purposes….
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Van Dieren, W. (1995). Failures of the System of National Accounts. In: Van Dieren, W. (eds) Taking Nature Into Account. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4246-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4246-8_5
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