In A History of National Accounting, Andre Vanoli focuses on the history of accounting in the second part of the 20th century. The book is about the relations between economic theories and the observation of the present and the past looked at from the viewpoint of economic measurement. Some parts of the book are especially devoted to the French experience in this field, but the point of view is deliberately universal. The publication is about; The birth of national accounting; The evolution of systems of accounts and accounting issues in the perspective of international harmonization; National accounts as a statistical synthesis; Concepts and their relations with economic theory; Uses and status of national accounting.

This is an update of OECD 2006 "Understanding National Accounts". It contains new data, new chapters and is adapted to the new systems of national accounts, SNA 2008 and ESA 2010.

This clear and concise Advanced Introduction to National Accounting explores the post-1960 modernization of national accounting. John M. Hartwick offers insights into the arrival of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and user cost, highlighting the importance of Tornqvist index numbers and translog production, cost and utility functions in its modernization.

The 1993 SNA represents a major advance in national accounting. While updating and clarifying the 1968 SNA, the 1993 SNA provides the basis for improving compilation of national accounts statistics, promoting integration of economic and related statistics, and enhancing analysis of economic developments. The 1993 SNA deals more clearly with relationships between economic flows (such as production, income, savings, accumulation, and financing) and links between these flows and stocks. At the same time the 1993 SNA reflects the many significant developments that have taken place in financial markets and completes the integration of balance sheets into the system. The 1993 SNA also suggests how satellite accounts (e.g. environmental accounts) and alternative classifications (e.g., through social accounting matrices) an be used to augment the central framework of the system.

In order to really see the forest, what's the best way to count the trees? Understanding how the economy interacts with the environment has important implications for policy, regulatory, and business decisions. How should our national economic accounts recognize the increasing interest in and importance of the environment? Nature's Numbers responds to concerns about how the United States should make these measurements. The book recommends how to incorporate environmental and other non-market measures into the nation's income and product accounts. The panel explores alternative approaches to environmental accounting, including those used in other countries, and addresses thorny issues such as how to measure the stocks of natural resources and how to value non-market activities and assets. Specific applications to subsoil minerals, forests, and clean air show how the general principles can be applied. The analysis and insights provided in this book will be of interest to economists, policymakers, environmental advocates, economics faculty, businesses based on natural resources, and managers concerned with the role of the environment in our economic affairs.

How GDP came to rule our lives—and why it needs to change Why did the size of the U.S. economy increase by 3 percent on one day in mid-2013—or Ghana's balloon by 60 percent overnight in 2010? Why did the U.K. financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008—just as the world’s financial system went into meltdown? And why was Greece’s chief statistician charged with treason in 2013 for apparently doing nothing more than trying to accurately report the size of his country’s economy? The answers to all these questions lie in the way we define and measure national economies around the world: Gross Domestic Product. This entertaining and informative book tells the story of GDP, making sense of a statistic that appears constantly in the news, business, and politics, and that seems to rule our lives—but that hardly anyone actually understands. Diane Coyle traces the history of this artificial, abstract, complex, but exceedingly important statistic from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors through its invention in the 1940s and its postwar golden age, and then through the Great Crash up to today. The reader learns why this standard measure of the size of a country’s economy was invented, how it has changed over the decades, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. The book explains why even small changes in GDP can decide elections, influence major political decisions, and determine whether countries can keep borrowing or be thrown into recession. The book ends by making the case that GDP was a good measure for the twentieth century but is increasingly inappropriate for a twenty-first-century economy driven by innovation, services, and intangible goods.

Surely everyone wants to know the source of happiness, and indeed, economists and social scientists are increasingly interested in the study and effects of subjective well-being. Putting forward a rigorous method and new data for measuring, comparing, and analyzing the relationship between well-being and the way people spend their time—across countries, demographic groups, and history—this book will help set the agenda of research and policy for decades to come. It does so by introducing a system of National Time Accounting (NTA), which relies on individuals’ own evaluations of their emotional experiences during various uses of time, a distinct departure from subjective measures such as life satisfaction and objective measures such as the Gross Domestic Product. A distinguished group of contributors here summarize the NTA method, provide illustrative findings about well-being based on NTA, and subject the approach to a rigorous conceptual and methodological critique that advances the field. As subjective well-being is topical in economics, psychology, and other social sciences, this book should have cross-disciplinary appeal.