The Scottish governments states: "A wide variety of data sources were used to compile the tables, including business surveys and UK National Accounts information, Scottish Government surveys and other official sources. As a result, National Input-Output tables are usually compiled 2-3 years after the year to which they relate." http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Economy/Input-Output/DataSources
"A wide variety of data sources" sums it up well. Four main sources of I/O tables are: - direct enterprise surveys (economic or business surveys) of institutional units, - administrative or managerial records of institutional units (internal accounting or process records) - published information by institutional units (such as public quarterly or annual activity reports), - estimates constructed using data for related variables and models. As regards the first-mentioned, few countries survey all enterprises in the same year, rather, they have a sequence of surveys across several years. For those years for which there are no direct survey data, they may construct estimates (mathematically you can work out that the true value must lie within certain limits, you can work out an average incremental change per year, you can demonstrate the normal relationship between known values and unknow values etc.). In practice, the national accounts people usually allot different sectors to different staff members or teams, who construct the estimates according to a standard methodology. Under some or other law, government agencies may sometimes collect data on particular kinds of transactions, which can be used for estimating purposes. With some sectors, it may be that one or a few very large companies may account for 80-90% of all activity in the sector, in which case you can use their internal or public reports. The OECD, which has the largest I/O database in the world, points out that I/O tables can in principle be constructed according to product, or according to industry, but that, in fact, the tables are nearly always constructed according to industry. The reason is twofold: relevant usable data on expenditure and revenue is usually only available by industry, and, if you used a product-based approach then it is difficult to make many international comparisons. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/54/37585924.pdf The foundational concepts structuring the categorical system of macro-economic production statistics are those of value-added and capital formation, which to my knowledge have never been criticized by Marxists, but these concepts do not necessarily mesh at all with the revenue and expenditure data of institutional units. Hence the company data are often adjusted to bring them into line with the measurement concept. The adjustment is made either by asking the institutional unit to supply data in a specific form at the point of collection (which is cheaper), or by adjusting the data which institutional units provide after collection. Jurriaan _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
