Tracking economic well-being in the 2025 System of National Accounts

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.