Abstract
The System of National Accounts (SNA) is the international standard for countries to compile macroeconomic statistics, covering a full set of interconnected tables that provides users with insights into a country's economy. A lot of the indicators from the SNA are heavily used by policy analysts to obtain insights in various aspects of the economy and its most well-known indicator, GDP, is often used to represent societal progress or the economic well-being of the population. Over the past decade, there has been increasing criticism that policy users are placing too much emphasis on GDP. As it is primarily constructed as a measure of production, it is indeed correct that GDP is not a good indicator to assess overall well-being. In that regard, there are various other indicators in the SNA that are doing a better job in providing insights in household's material well-being, such as household income and wealth, although they also fall short of capturing various elements that would be of relevance in assessing people's well-being. For these reasons, the international statistical community has explored what information and indicators could be added to the framework to provide better insights in aspects related to well-being. Although well-being is a multidimensional phenomenon that covers several objective and subjective elements that go beyond the scope of the SNA, it has been acknowledged that the framework may still provide important insights to users. This article provides an overview of the new elements included in the 2025 SNA to shed more light on various aspects affecting well-being, providing an overview of the conceptual framework and presenting the new elements, including labour, health care, education, unpaid household service work, and household distributional results.
Introduction
The System of National Accounts (SNA) is the international standard or ‘framework’ for countries to compile their macroeconomic statistics. It covers a full set of interconnected tables that provides users with insights into a country's economy, covering important indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Gross National Income (GNI) and National Net Worth. A lot of these indicators are heavily used by policy analysts to obtain insights in various aspects of the economy. Furthermore, although not set up for this purpose, GDP is often used to represent societal progress or the economic well-being of the population.
Over the past decade, there has been increasing criticism that policy users are placing too much emphasis on GDP while it is not capturing various elements that are of relevance for people's well-being. As it is primarily constructed as a measure of production, it is indeed correct that GDP is not a good indicator to assess overall well-being. In that regard, there are various other indicators in the SNA that are doing a better job in providing insights in household's material well-being, such as (real) household disposable income and household net worth. However, these also fall short of capturing various elements that would be of relevance in assessing people's well-being.
As part of the update of the System of National Accounts, the international statistical community has explored what information and indicators could be added to the framework to provide better insights in aspects related to well-being. Although well-being is a multidimensional phenomenon that covers several objective and subjective elements that go beyond the scope of the SNA, it may still provide important insights to users. Leveraging off the benefits of the SNA as a coherent framework, it may provide insights in how the economy may affect specific aspects of well-being and help identifying linkages (including trade-offs and win-wins) between some of these aspects.
This article provides an overview of the new elements included in the 2025 SNA to shed more light on various aspects affecting well-being. It starts with the conceptual framework in Section 2, zooming in on the various aspects of well-being and discussing what the SNA could bring to the debate. It also shows what new elements have been included in the new SNA and how these elements link to the traditional framework. Section 3 discusses the new elements in more detail, reflecting on the new guidance in the area of labour, health care, education, unpaid household service work, and household distributional results. The article finishes with some conclusions in Section 4.
Well-being in the 2025 SNA
In order to assess how the SNA can contribute to the discussions on well-being, it is important to have a better understanding of the concept of well-being. Section 2 of the article “Measuring sustainability: statistics for long-term policy choices” provides a useful description of the theoretical background of well-being and sustainability, linking it to the concept of sustainable development, i.e., the extent to which well-being can be sustained over time, and explaining that households’ well-being concerns a multidimensional concept that covers multiple subjective and objective dimensions, including economic, social and environmental aspects. With this in mind, it can be assessed to what extent the 2025 SNA may provide information on specific aspects linked to the economy that may complement other frameworks and measurement initiatives in order to support well-being analyses and discussions.
First of all, well-being may cover objective and subjective measures. Objective measures focus on various elements of people's lives such as income and consumption, health, knowledge and skills, use of time, and social connections, and is also commonly referred to as material well-being. Subjective measures concern self-reported well-being indicators including evaluations on how people feel about certain aspects of their lives or elements affecting their well-being. Given the set-up of the SNA as a macro-economic accounting framework, the focus will only be on material well-being. Subjective measures will be the focus of social statistics.
Secondly, in well-being discussions, it is important to distinguish between outputs and outcomes. Outputs are the direct result of specific activities or policies (such as increased health care spending), whereas outcomes are reflecting the indirect consequences of these outputs (such as increased life expectancy). Policy makers normally target specific outputs in order to reach certain outcomes. Given the set-up of the system, the main focus of the SNA will be on measuring outputs, allowing for analytical linkages to possible outcome measures not in scope of the SNA.
Considering the relative strengths of the SNA as an accounting framework, the international statistical community explored what information and indicators could be added to provide better insights in aspects related to well-being. This could be in the form of 1) supplementary accounts, i.e., in line with the asset and production boundary of the integrated framework providing more detailed information on a specific topic (e.g., providing environmental-economic breakdowns), 2) thematic accounts, i.e., (mainly) operating within the asset and production boundary providing additional detail on a certain aspect or theme (e.g., health care), and 3) extended accounts, i.e., covering elements that go beyond the boundaries of the SNA, relying on different concepts or definitions (such as unpaid household service work).
Figure 1 provides an overview of the various elements included in the 2025 SNA to provide better insights in well-being aspects and how they relate to the integrated framework of the national accounts. The latter comprises the main sequence of economic accounts 1 , as well as the supplementary tables fully in line with the SNA boundaries. The first column describes the aspects related to material well-being that are fully in line with the integrated framework. In addition to household indicators already included in the main sequence of accounts (such as household disposable income, consumption and wealth), the 2025 SNA also includes information on labour and on household distributional accounts as standard components of the integrated framework.
Aspects of well-being as covered in the 2025 SNA. Source: 1 .
The second column focuses on those aspects whose measurement is incorporated in thematic and extended accounts outside the integrated framework of the SNA, as they may go beyond the traditional SNA boundaries. This concerns thematic accounts on health care and on education and training. Furthermore, it includes extended accounts on unpaid household service work and on ecosystem services (the latter are discussed in the article “Measuring sustainability: statistics for long-term policy choices”).
Finally, the third column lists a range of other aspects which are commonly considered in the assessment of well-being, but which are out of scope of the discussion of material well-being within the context of the integrated framework of national accounts, focusing on aspects such as health outcomes, governance, social cohesion, crime and justice outcomes, and subjective well-being. 2
This section provides an overview of the new elements included in the 2025 SNA as explained in the previous section, covering labour, health care, education, unpaid household services, and household distributional information.
Labour
Whereas the 2008 SNA already included extensive guidance on capital, goods and services, the information on labour was still relatively limited. However, detailed data on labour is very relevant to respond to important policy questions, for example around the distribution of income and wealth, assessing the impacts of digitalisation and globalisation on labour markets and people's well-being, and analysing how productivity growth may boost real household income.
For this reason, the 2025 SNA recommends the inclusion of new tables on labour as a standard component to accompany the sequence of economic accounts. These new ‘labour tables’ will provide coherent data on aspects of the labour market, both in monetary and in physical terms, focusing on four dimensions: Jobs: Information on jobs, broken down into filled jobs (main and secondary) and vacancies. Persons: Information on the labour force, broken down into employed (both employees and self-employed) and unemployed persons, and on under-utilisation. This dimension will also include demographic breakdowns by gender, age and educational attainment. Volume: Information on aspects of the labour market in terms of hours (hours worked, hours sought but not worked, hours paid, overtime hours paid for, average hours worked per job). Payments: Information on labour costs incurred by enterprises and incomes received for labour, including additional indicators such as average costs per hour worked, average costs per hour paid and average labour income per employed person.
Figure 2 provides a schematic overview of the information included in these labour market tables, presenting the four dimensions in different quadrants and also showing the interlinkages between the dimensions.
Labour market tables framework. Source: 1 .
These new labour tables will provide insights into the labour market, its role in the distribution of income, and the role of labour in economic growth. Furthermore, they will provide more insights in aspects of people's well-being, first of all acknowledging that labour provides the income needed to satisfy basic needs and pursue other important life goals. Second, the quality of a job, the opportunities it provides to develop new skills, and the time spent in the workplace are all aspects directly affecting household well-being. In that regard, the tables will provide insights into working and living conditions, including the impact of changes in production arrangements, driven, for example, by digitalisation and globalisation.
Given health is an essential element of well-being and can be directly linked to the development and enhancement of human capital, detailed insights in the production and outputs of the health care systems in countries, the entities involved, and how this activity is being financed are very important for policymakers. The key recommendation in the 2025 SNA is to regularly compile thematic tables on health care, including detailed information on estimates of health care outputs and their consumption in terms of functions, providers and financing schemes, in line with the System of Health Accounts 2011
2
: In terms of functions, breakdowns are recommended separately identifying curative care, rehabilitative care, long-term care, ancillary services, medical goods, preventive care, governance and health system and financing administration, and other health care services. In terms of providers, breakdowns are recommended separately identifying hospitals, residential long-term care facilities, providers of ambulatory health care, providers of ancillary services, retailers and providers of medical goods, providers of preventive care, providers of health care system administration and financing, the rest of the economy, and the rest of the world. In terms of financing, breakdowns are recommended separately identifying government schemes and compulsory contributory health care financing schemes, voluntary health care payment schemes, household out-of-pocket payments, and non-resident financing schemes.
The focus of measurement here is on the outputs of a country's health system rather than the health outcomes that might be reported in terms of expected life years and similar statistics. While the provision of health care may not always be the primary determinant of health outcomes, the information from health accounts can still give direct insight into the nature of the societal response to securing those outcomes.
On the basis of this information, if possible broken down by socio-demographic characteristics (such as age and gender), important indicators can be developed to provide insights into the provision of health care, such as health care expenditures as a share of GDP, per capita or per household group (e.g., broken down by age and gender), expenditure by health care function, and the shares between health care expenditures paid out of own pocket versus the payments made by private insurance, government and/or non-profit organisations. To support derivation of more cross-cutting indicators, it is also recommended to ensure the inclusion of measures in physical terms, such as employment in health and social care, and number of hospital beds available.
Figure 3 provides an example of information that can be derived from the thematic tables on health. It presents information on health expenditure by type of service for a range of countries, based on Health at a Glance. 3 It shows that curative and rehabilitative care services make up the bulk of health spending in OECD countries and are primarily delivered through inpatient and outpatient services. Medical goods make up a further 18%, followed by long-term care services, which amount to 13% of health spending on average in 2021. Administration and overall governance of the health system, together with preventive care account for the remaining 9% of health spending.
Health expenditure by type of service, 2021 (or nearest year). Note: countries are ranked by curative-rehabilitative care as a share of current expenditure on health. * Refers to curative-rehabilitative care in patient and day care setting. ** Includes home care and ancillary services. Source: 3 .
From an economic viewpoint, education is important for improving both career opportunities and living conditions by gaining knowledge and skills that can be used in day-to-day life. Furthermore, it provides a sense of self-fulfilment that may also enhance well-being. Many people spend large portions of their life in the education system, so it is important to fully understand the production and outputs of these institutions, the units providing the services, and how activities are financed.
The 2025 SNA recommends the regular compilation of thematic tables on education and training. These encompass tables on education output by provider and purpose, education expenditure by purchaser and purpose, financing of education expenditure by sector and purpose, distinguishing the following breakdowns: Purpose: Pre-primary education, primary education, secondary education, higher education, cultural, sport and recreation education, other education and vocational training, in-house training, and other education. Provider: Central government, state government, local government, NPISH, market producers in education, other market producers, and non-residents. Financing: Central government, state government, local government, NPISH, households, other institutional sectors, and exports.
The monetary information can be supplemented with non-monetary data, for example on population, enrolled students (broken down by sex and age group), and teachers/staff or employed persons by educational attainment. This information would allow compiling indicators such as per capita or per student expenditures. Furthermore, it is recommended to include information on time spent on learning for the years this information is available, potentially from time use accounts as compiled in the context of unpaid household service work (see Section 3.4), acknowledging the important contribution of education to building the stock of human capital. 3
All of this information will provide important insights into the operation of the education system, the way in which it contributes to the development of human capital, how it affects labour markets, which household groups are benefiting from what types of education specifically, and how it is financed.
As an example, Figure 4 provides an overview of expenditure as a share of GDP broken down into different levels of education across OECD countries. On average, OECD countries spend 4.9% of GDP on educational institutions from primary to tertiary levels, with Iceland, Israel, Norway and the United Kingdom showing the highest expenditures. Primary education takes up the largest share in nearly all countries, amounting to 1.4% of GDP on average, with spending on lower and upper secondary education being equal to 1.0% of GDP each. Early childhood education amounts to 0.9% of GDP on average across OECD countries.
Expenditure on educational institutions as a percentage of GDP, by level of education (2021). Source: 4 .
The 2025 SNA excludes unpaid household service activities (except for owner-occupied housing) from its production boundary mainly for practical reasons. However, understanding this work is crucial to the analysis of household well-being as this is affected by both paid and unpaid work, with each feeding into goods and services consumed by households. The measurement of unpaid work also contributes to a fuller understanding of economic growth, factoring in the impact of shifts across the SNA production boundary for many activities.
The 2025 SNA recommends the regular compilation of extended accounts on unpaid household service work at least every five years, to complement measures in the main sequence of economic accounts. These measures will be used to complement GDP with estimates of unpaid household service production, as well as to derive complementary measures of household (adjusted) disposable income, reflecting the implicit income derived from unpaid household service work. Unpaid household service work covers any activity that would meet the third-party criterion, in other words, the potential to contract out the activities to a market service provider, distinguishing the following categories: Childcare Adult care Nutrition Transport Household management services Laundry and clothing services Shopping Information services Other unpaid household production not elsewhere classified Organisation-based volunteering Direct volunteering
Accounts for unpaid household service work will provide insights into structural changes between paid and unpaid work, highlighting the services most affected. This would help to respond to various policy questions, for example to assess the impact of relying on informal care in health care provision, the extent to which lock-down measures during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a higher level of engagement of parents assisting their children in education, and the impact of digitalisation on people undertaking specific activities themselves for which they normally would have relied on companies (such as booking your own travel instead of going to a travel agency).
It is also recommended to include memorandum items for a breakdown in physical terms for these activities, including leisure time and hours spent on other activities not included elsewhere (such as eating, drinking, sleeping, leisure, exercising). This will help at arriving at a complete accounting for the use of time, recognizing that time available for leisure activities clearly contributes to well-being and is subject to important trade-offs with market consumption.
A breakdown of the information according to socio-demographic characteristics, such as by gender, age and educational attainment, is also recommended, as well as complementing other accounts (such as on labour, health care and education) with information (both monetary and non-monetary) on unpaid household activities, in order to obtain a more comprehensive overview and to analyse trade-offs between paid and unpaid elements of these important aspects adding to people's well-being.
As an example, Figure 5 presents the value of own-account production of unpaid household services for the G7 economies for 2015, distinguishing two valuation methods. The replacement cost approach uses a wage rate representative of the relevant activities to derive a market value of the work, whereas the opportunity costs approach focuses on the market income foregone as a result of spending time on unpaid household activities. Focusing on the replacement cost approach, the imputed monetary value ranges from 14.7% of GDP for Canada to 25.6% for Italy. The numbers for the opportunity costs method range from 43.7% for Japan to 68.6% for Germany.
Value of own-account production of unpaid household services, 2015. Source: 5 .
Information on the distribution of resources among households is required for policy makers to understand inequality and its evolution over time. Aggregate results for the overall household sector can conceal significant differences in the distribution of income, consumption and wealth among households. Distributional results provide insight on how groups are faring in light of macroeconomic trends and policies, and what policy measures are needed to address specific issues.
The 2025 SNA recommends the regular compilation of household distributions as standard component to accompany the sequence of economic accounts, providing consistent results across income, consumption, saving and wealth for specific household groups. At a minimum, a breakdown of income, consumption and wealth in the sequence of economic accounts by income and wealth deciles is recommended. If possible, median values, results for the top 5% and ideally the top 1% of the distribution should be compiled. Alternative breakdowns may also be included, for instance by main source of income and by household type.
In presenting data according to these household types, it is relevant to record complementary information on the relevant socio-demographic characteristics of the individuals within the households (e.g., their age, sex, income, employment status, educational attainment). This information supports a richer understanding of the composition of the various household groups given that households may be composed of a variety of individuals with different characteristics and backgrounds. In addition to the results from the main sequence of accounts, household distributional results can also be compiled for topics covered by other accounts and tables, such as the value of unpaid household service work, labour, education and health expenditures.
The OECD's Expert Group on Disparities in a National Accounts framework (EG DNA) has shown that it is possible to do these kinds of calculations for household income, as well as for consumption and saving. 6 On household wealth distributions, work has been done by the European Central Bank's Expert Group on Distributional Financial Accounts (EG DFA) 7 and by countries such as Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States, while the OECD launched a new Expert Group on the Distribution of Household Wealth (EG DHW) in 2023 to develop a harmonized template and guidelines so that the work can be expanded to a larger range of countries.
Figure 6 presents an example of distributional results in line with national accounts, focusing on the relative income of each income quintile to the average for the household sector as a whole for a select group of countries. Mexico shows the highest disparities with household income in the fifth quintile earning 2.73 times the average, whereas the lowest earners (first quintile) only earn 0.36 times the average. The United States also show relatively large disparities with the 20% lowest income households only earning 0.31 times the average versus 2.30 for the highest income households. Similar patterns, albeit with varying degrees of inequality, are observed in the other four countries.
Adjusted disposable income of each income quintile relative to the average of the household sector as a whole. Source: author's calculations.
This article presented an overview of the specific elements included in the 2025 SNA that provide better insights in aspects affecting household well-being, addressing increasing concerns that GDP is not capturing all aspects relevant for people's well-being. In addition to important indicators already included in the main sequence of accounts that may be a better proxy for material well-being than GDP (such as household disposable income, consumption and wealth), the 2025 SNA includes new tables and indicators on labour, health care, education, unpaid household work, and distributional results.
Some of the elements described in this article concern new standard components to accompany the sequence of economic accounts (i.e., labour and household distributional information), while others concern extensions beyond the integrated framework of the SNA, either in the form of thematic accounts (i.e., education and health care) or extended accounts (i.e., unpaid household services). These accounts have been constructed in such a way that they can be implemented as individual accounts or used in combination with other accounts and data. Furthermore, as described in the article “Measuring sustainability: statistics for long-term policy choices”, there are also specific tables and accounts to monitor aspects regarding the sustainability of well-being, among others capturing various environmental-economic issues.
The SNA provides conceptual guidance to facilitate international comparability of these standard, supplementary, thematic and extended accounts and to encourage as many countries as possible to compile the relevant results. However, the choice of what to implement will be dependent on a country's economic, social and environmental context, the current and future priority policy issues, and resources available for data collection and compilation. It will be important for national statistical compilers to engage in conversations with their users to assess policy needs and to set the priorities for the coming years.
In addition to the conceptual guidance, there will also be a need to develop practical guidance to assist countries in their compilation efforts. Guidance is already available for several of the topics discussed in the article (e.g., handbooks on health accounts, education and training accounts, and distributional accounts on income, consumption and saving), but in some areas the guidance may require updating, among others to bring it up to speed with latest developments (for example updating the categories on unpaid household activities to recognize new activities in view of digitalisation), or there may be the need for completely new guidance (see for example the forthcoming guidance on distributional wealth accounts 8 ).
It will also be relevant for countries to start exchanging experiences and comparing experimental estimates. This will help to assess the feasibility of the guidance and to finetune where needed, to obtain more insights in the data and resources needed for the work, and to further improve the results by exchanging best practices. On the basis of these exchanges, it can then also be reviewed at what frequency the tables can be compiled and at what level of detail.
Finally, in addition to implementing the guidance as included in the 2025 SNA, it will also be important to continue reflecting what elements could be added to the SNA to provide further insights in view of the well-being and sustainability (or ‘Beyond GDP’) discussion. This calls for a close collaboration between macroeconomic statisticians, experts in the well-being and sustainability community, and policy users in order to assess specific (new) data needs and in what way the communities can reinforce each other to better address some of these policy needs. In this way, the international statistical community can ensure to continue providing users with high-quality, topical information to serve as crucial input for policies supporting household well-being.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.