Abstract
1. The New SNA: Already Moving Beyond GDP
In March 2025, the UN Statistical Commission adopted an updated version of the national accounting standard—the System of National Accounts 2025. This new standard, only the fourth update since it was first adopted in 1953, was a significant moment for macro-economic statistics and for the Commission. Such periodic updates are necessary as national accounts, like any other statistical framework must evolve and adapt to remain relevant and to account for changes in our economies and societies.
The 2025 update, the first since 2008, was important as it introduced several changes to address measurement challenges arising from increasing globalization, and digitalization, and many longstanding criticisms regarding (the lack of information on) well-being and its sustainability. These changes include: the recording of depletion of natural resources as a cost of production and a greater emphasis on net measures (including net of depletion) to better reflect the actual value created by production; distinguishing natural resources as a separate category including more granular breakdowns to provide enhanced insights on the role of different types of natural resources and how their value may change as a consequence of their use in production; the introduction of renewable energy resources as a new asset class; the disaggregation of corporations into foreign-controlled, public, and national private corporations to better understand the impact of globalization; and the introduction of crypto assets as a new asset class, and specific accounting rules to account for the role of AI, cloud computing, and digital intermediary platforms.
One change is especially noteworthy—the inclusion of data as a produced asset. Data play a central role in today’s digital and knowledge economies. The explosion of digital data and the increasing value being placed on ownership meant that this issue could no longer be ignored by the SNA. Nevertheless, the decision in the 2025 SNA to record data on the balance sheet raises some fascinating implementation questions. Not least, how to value different datasets, particularly where no market transactions have taken place, and how quickly to depreciate those data. Some data may have qualities more in common with a valuable (e.g., a rare painting or a vintage bottle of wine) that appreciates over time rather than depreciates—so by insisting on a depreciating life cycle have we speciously imposed an accounting standard more appropriate to the physical than the digital world? Digital data are non-rivalrous, meaning that data can be consumed (or re-consumed) many times and by many people simultaneously. They are also easily replicated and shared (MacFeely et al. 2022) posing some knotty issues around potential duplication and double counting. Thus, while it is clear that data cannot be ignored by the SNA, some interesting dilemmas remain regarding the practicalities. For that reason, the national accounts community is working on guidelines to support compilers with the implementation of this recommendation.
These changes, while necessary, increase the complexity and the length of already dense and extensive SNA guidelines (the English version of the 2008 guidelines were 662 pages long, the 2025 edition exceeds 1,200 pages). Even understanding the changes proposed and engaging in the intellectual debate places an enormous burden on countries, and international organizations, requiring substantial upfront investment in human and financial resources and involving notable opportunity costs. Additional complexity will unavoidably make implementation more expensive too, placing additional requirements on already stretched statistical systems to produce the necessary input data. A more complex SNA will be more difficult to explain (and understand). Furthermore, greater reliance on models (and thus assumptions) to measure some of the more opaque aspects of the economy will likely further reduce explainability and may dilute the real economic signals.
As of 2022, the UN Statistics Division reported that only two thirds of countries worldwide had implemented the 2008 SNA guidelines (United Nations, 2023), posing uncomfortable questions as to what it really means to adopt a statistical standard. One can argue that this presents a falsely pessimistic picture, as some countries may not have adopted (all of) the 2008 SNA because some of the updates to the 1993 edition (largely involving the inclusion of financial innovations and the recording of R&D as investment) were not especially relevant to them. But as MacFeely et al. (2024) point out, it is also true that only about half of all countries compile their GDP estimates using all three (income, expenditure, and production) approaches. Moreover, only a selection of countries currently compile comprehensive balance sheets that include non-produced non-financial assets, such as natural resources. Taking these as barometers, it is hard to dispute the assessment that many countries are struggling to implement the full SNA, be it the 2008 SNA or earlier editions. In the coming years, greater efforts will be needed to help countries adopt the 2025 SNA (especially those still struggling to implement the 2008 standards) with the aim of improving international comparability. Arguably, more robust measures of compliance would also be useful.
The variety of approaches and methodologies adopted by member states, noted above, impacts comparability (Smith 2019). It is important that users appreciate quality and comparability concerns. To this end, some have proposed producing uncertainty measures to accompany macroeconomic accounts (e.g., Mushkudiani et al. 2020). In principle this seems sensible, but in practice meaningful measures may be difficult to produce, especially given the wide variety of input data used by the SNA.
Notwithstanding the growing complexity of the SNA, people can still use macro-economic indicators (in the same way that many of us drive cars without really understanding what goes on underneath the hood). But not fully understanding that complexity, or appreciating the challenges regarding quality and comparability, makes it difficult for many users to engage with all elements of the SNA.
Thus, national accountants find themselves between a rock and a hard place—struggling to reconcile the unreconcilable; trying to find a balance between conceptual purity and feasible implementation; between relevance, comprehensiveness, parsimony, and understandability.
2. Moving Further Beyond GDP
In addition to the aforementioned challenges (globalization, digitalization, etc.), GDP, and by extension the SNA, has historically received considerable criticism for being a poor measure of social progress or well-being. These accusations puzzle and often frustrate national accountants, who point out that the SNA and GDP were never intended to provide measures of social progress or well-being. Notwithstanding the original intention, the 2025 SNA will nevertheless support several broad measures of material wellbeing and sustainability, including the introduction of distributional results to provide additional insights on how different household groups are doing. Moreover, they will introduce new labor accounts, thematic accounts on education and health care, and extended accounts on unpaid household activities. The new SNA, as noted above, will also introduce new methods to record depletion as a cost of production and will better account for different types of natural resources. Furthermore, the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), which became a statistical standard in 2012 and has been adopted by many countries around the world, provides important complements to the core SNA.
The criticisms that GDP is a poor measure of wellbeing and that it does not adequately address sustainability are at the heart of what might be termed the “Beyond GDP” movement. Enthusiasm for “Beyond GDP” has ebbed and flowed since the 1970s but has been embraced recently by the UN, specifically in Action 53 of the Pact for the Future (United Nations 2024) which calls for measures of progress on sustainable development to complement and go beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP). While this had been anticipated by the UN Secretary-General’s report, Our Common Agenda (United Nations 2021) and the 2030 Agenda (United Nations 2015), which both called for measures to complement GDP, the UN is now in the process of formally establishing a high-level panel to determine the scope of “Beyond GDP.” It will be critical that this high-level panel understands the changes already made to the SNA to avoid repeating out-of-date criticisms.
3. A System of Systems?
In November 2022, the UN Network of Economic Statisticians outlined their ambitions regarding “Beyond GDP” (Havinga 2022) where they proposed a “system of systems.” They envisioned a “Central Framework for Inclusive and Sustainable Wellbeing” feeding off or integrating three sets of accounts: the SNA; the SEEA; and a new System of Population and Social Accounts (SPSA). This last set of accounts, the proposed SPSA, resurrects ideas put forward by Richard Stone in the 1970s (Stone 1975). This ambitious plan poses some interesting questions, not least how these frameworks can be integrated, as there is no obvious common denominator. It also poses some challenging governance questions as to how such a system would be managed and developed over time as it appears to significantly alter the existing global architecture.
Earlier the same year, the UN Statistical Commission established a Friends of the Chair (FoC) group to review social and demographic statistics (Decision 53/105). As part of this holistic review, they are considering the feasibility and wisdom of a SPSA. In their 2024 report, the FoC determined the elemental building blocks of social and demographic statistics: people; outcomes (objective and subjective); and relationships, while identifying two cross-cutting building blocks: place and time. This was an important determination as these blocks do not obviously correspond to those used in the economic domain. While not yet making any final decision, the FoC have expressed “concern that an economic accounting approach might not be an adequate tool for addressing and capturing the complexity of human behaviours and interactions and [noted] that social accounts are seldom used for informing social policy” (Friends of the Chair 2024).
Any system of systems should be approached with caution. Rather than adding coherence, it may in fact be counterproductive, by adding unnecessary complexity or by artificially forcing accounting standards on domains where they do not make sense. An alternative approach might be to consider the SNA as a System of National Economic Accounts (SNEA), as proposed by Vanoli (2017), that can be connected to the SEEA and a SPSA. Clearly some sort of framework for social and demographic statistics would be helpful in planning and integrating a very broad and heterogeneous range of topics and measurement tools. Whether a SPSA is that framework or is even feasible remains to be seen, with FoC having made some very interesting proposals in this regard. A later step will be to consider how best to link such a framework with the SNA and the SEEA.
4. Conclusion and Reflections
There are many changes underway in the world of macro-economics, all aiming to produce more comprehensive statistics that can better address current and emerging policy questions. The challenges of globalization, digitalization, wellbeing, and sustainability have informed the 2025 SNA update, the Beyond GDP initiative, and the national accounts research agenda (see: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/Consolidated_SNA_RA.asp). The new SNA has made significant steps toward addressing many of these historic criticisms. The SEEA too has made huge strides on the environmental and inter-temporal sustainability front.
National accountants have been known to wax lyrical on the majesty of the SNA. To them the internal consistency, the double-entry system, the inter-locking supply-use and institutional sector accounts, the linkages with balance of payments, the hierarchical system, cascading coherent logic throughout much of the broader statistical system, including business, price, labor market, and environmental statistics, is a thing of rare beauty and elegance. In their eyes, the SNA is an unsung wonder of the world, ranking as one of the great inventions of the twentieth century. It’s hard to argue the counter. The SNA is without question a marvel of intellect and logic. Little wonder Richard Stone was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1984 “for having made fundamental contributions to the development of systems of national accounts and hence greatly improved the basis for empirical economic analysis.”
And yet, today one cannot help wondering whether we are trapped in this elegant system. A system that has been laboriously constructed and refined over eighty years. A system so deviously complex, with so many interlinkages, that we cannot imagine an alternative. A system, that if we are honest, very few of us really understand. Perhaps we are afraid that if we tug on the thread too hard, the entire system might unravel. Ignoring the intellectual majesty and rigor of the SNA for a moment, what if we could start again with a clean slate, a blank page? Would we arrive at the same place? For whatever reason, perhaps time and resource constraints, there has never been a holistic or fundamental re-contemplation of macro-economic statistics. If there were, would we make the same fundamental decisions—about defense spending or unpaid work? In other words, if we were not building on and refining an existing SNA, but starting from scratch, would we construct such a complicated measurement system or even the same measurement system?
Whither Beyond GDP? With the changes to the SNA and the SEEA, how much farther do we need to go? Must our ambitions be restricted to developing a dashboard of supplementary indicators as has been recommended by the Pact for the Future (Action 53a) or could Beyond GDP be something more—a chapeau that provides an opportunity for a more holistic review? A review that could take the time to consider the full implications of a system of systems, and other alternatives. A review that might ask some other questions too: Have we been trying to force old rules from the physical world onto a new digital reality? Does it still make sense to try and assign the output and value added of multinationals, and super-platforms, which defy sovereignty on every level within national borders? As we try to capture ecosystems and biodiversity, are we pushing the limits of environmental measurement too far, is it too reductionist to attempt to measure hugely complex holistic systems in atomistic accounts? If Beyond GDP could provide the impetus for such a debate, what would be the appropriate timing? With a new SNA just adopted, perhaps some time is needed for reflection and assessment?
These are just some of the questions and dilemmas with which macro-economic statisticians are grappling. There are many noteworthy developments underway in the worlds of macro-economic and social and demographic statistics, all aiming to address longstanding and emerging policy concerns. This work quite sensibly builds upon existing frameworks to retain coherence and comparability between systems. And yet, one cannot help but wonder whether we need to re-examine statistics, and macro-economic statistics in particular, from a more holistic perspective. Or perhaps such a thought is heresy?
