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N° 517-518-519 - 2020 Economie StatistiqueET ECONOMIE ET STATISTIQUE / ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS ECONOMIE ET STATISTIQUE Economics AND Statistics Numéro spécial Au-delà et autour du PIB : questions à la comptabilité nationale Special Issue Beyond and Around GDP: Questions to National Accounting N° 517-518-519 - 2020 Conseil scientifique / Scientific Committee Economie Jacques LE CACHEUX, président (Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour) ET Jérôme BOURDIEU (École d’économie de Paris) Pierre CAHUC (Sciences Po) Statistique Gilbert CETTE (Banque de France et École d’économie d’Aix-Marseille) Yannick L’HORTY (Université de Paris-Est - Marne la Vallée) Daniel OESCH (Life Course and Inequality Research (LINES) et Institut des sciences sociales - Université de Lausanne) Economics Sophie PONTHIEUX (Insee) AND Katheline SCHUBERT (École d’économie de Paris, Université Paris I) Claudia SENIK (Université Paris-Sorbonne et École d’économie de Paris) Statistics Louis-André VALLET (Observatoire sociologique du changement-Sciences Po/CNRS) François-Charles WOLFF (Université de Nantes) Comité éditorial / Editorial Advisory Board Luc ARRONDEL (École d’économie de Paris) Lucio BACCARO (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies-Cologne et Département de Sociologie-Université de Genève) Antoine BOZIO (Institut des politiques publiques/École d’économie de Paris) Clément CARBONNIER (Théma/Université de Cergy-Pontoise et LIEPP- Sciences Po) Erwan GAUTIER (Banque de France et Université de Nantes) Pauline GIVORD (Ocde et Crest) Florence JUSOT (Université Paris-Dauphine, Leda-Legos et Irdes) François LEGENDRE (Erudite/Université Paris-Est) Claire LELARGE (Université de Paris-Sud, Paris-Saclay et Crest) Claire LOUPIAS (Direction générale du Trésor) Pierre PORA (Insee) Ariell RESHEF (École d'économie de Paris, Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne et CEPII) Thepthida SOPRASEUTH (Théma/Université de Cergy-Pontoise) Directeur de la publication / Director of Publication: Jean-Luc TAVERNIER Rédactrice en chef / Editor in Chief: Sophie PONTHIEUX Responsable éditorial / Editorial Manager: Pascal GODEFROY Assistant éditorial / Editorial Assistant: Étienne de LATUDE Traductions / Translations: RWS Language Solutions Chiltern Park, Chalfont St. Peter, Bucks, SL9 9FG Royaume-Uni La revue est en accès libre sur le site www.insee.fr. Maquette PAO et impression / CAP and printing: JOUVE Il est possible de s’abonner aux avis de parution sur le 1, rue du Docteur-Sauvé, BP3, 53101 Mayenne site. La revue peut être achetée sur le site www.insee.fr, rubrique « Services / Acheter nos publications ». La revue est également en vente dans 200 librairies à Paris et en province. The journal is available in open access on the Insee website www.insee.fr. Publication alerts can be subscribed on-line. The printed version of the journal (in French) can be purchased on the Insee website www.insee.fr. © Insee Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques 88, avenue Verdier - CS 70058 - 92541 Montrouge Cedex Tél : +33 (0)1 87 69 50 00 N° 517-518-519 - 2020 Economie StatistiqueET Economics AND Statistics The views or opinions expressed by the authors engage only themselves, and neither the institutions they work with, nor Insee. Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics Issue 517-518-519 – 2020 BEYOND AND AROUND GDP: QUESTIONS TO NATIONAL ACCOUNTING 5 Preface – National Accounting: Old Questions Revisited, Plus Some New Ones Diane Coyle WELL-BEING, INEQUALITIES, SUSTAINABILITY 9 Building Indicators for Inclusive Growth and its Sustainability: What Can the National Accounts Offer and How Can They Be Supplemented? Didier Blanchet and Marc Fleurbaey 25 Supplementing GDP: Some Recent Contributions from Official Social Statistics Jérôme Accardo 41 Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Global Inequality Estimates from WID.world Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman 61 Why and How Should Human Capital be Measured in National Accounts? Nicolas Canry 81 The Social Cost of Global Warming and Sustainability Indicators: Lessons from an Application to France Jean-Marc Germain and Thomas Lellouch NEW FORMS OF PRODUCTION: DIGITALIZATION AND FREE SERVICES 103 A Comparison of Deflators for Telecommunications Services Output Mo Abdirahman, Diane Coyle, Richard Heys and Will Stewart 123 Does Measurement of Digital Activities Explain Productivity Slowdown? The Case for Australia Derek Burnell and Amani Elnasri 139 Does the Digital Economy Distort the Volume-Price Split of GDP? The French Experience Lorraine Aeberhardt, Florian Hatier, Marie Leclair, Benoît Pentinat and Jean-Denis Zafar 157 Free Services from the Digital Economy: Do We Need to Measure Their Value and How? Alexandre Bourgeois GLOBALISED ECONOMIES 173 Irish GDP Growth in 2015: A Puzzle and Propositions for a Solution Marie-Baïanne Khder, Jérémi Montornès and Nicolas Ragache 191 Consistency in a Globalised Economy: Aligning the Treatment of R&D in the Irish National Accounts and Balance of Payments Niamh Holton, Margaret Kinsella, Oisín Mangan, Shaun McLaughlin and Patrick Quill 205 What Should the Concept of Domestic Production Mean in Globalized Economies? Didier Blanchet Preface – National Accounting: Old Questions Revisited, Plus Some New Ones Diane Coyle* Whether or not the national accounts were ‘one of the great inventions’ of the past century (Landefeld, 2000), they have certainly been one of the most influential. They are the lens through which we have viewed economic progress, focused ultimately on the growth in real GDP. As a result, governments promising to deliver progress to their citizens have been evaluated by that metric, and made policy decisions in order to deliver it. This issue of Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics provides a timely overview of key critiques – some old and some new – of the national accounts. It is timely not only because the process of preparing the revision of the System of National Accounts (SNA) by 2025 is under way, but also because the world economy has experienced its biggest decline in GDP in our memories due to the global pandemic. This is the moment to evaluate how well the national accounts still serve as what Hicks (1942) described as the ‘social framework’. The questions raised in this issue, all priorities in the current process of SNA revision, concern both old critiques of the national accounts for omitting important aspects of economic welfare (distribution, non‑monetary production, sustainability), and also newer critiques concerning the treatment of globalisation and digitalisation within the existing framework. To begin with the long‑standing questions, Didier Blanchet and Marc Fleurbaey in their paper put it succinctly: although the measure of real incomes provided by the national accounts captures an essential aspect of economic welfare, it omits non‑monetary compo‑ nents, and can tell us nothing about long‑term sustainability. These two problems differ in character. When it comes to non‑monetary contributors, there have been proposals for a number of alternative composite indicators, such as metrics of environmental damage or income inequality. The well‑known Human Development Index is one example. These tend to fall foul of their arbitrary choice of components and weights. There is now a substantial literature on the measurement of subjective well‑being, but it presents some unresolved challenges and ambiguities. The authors therefore favour a third approach, calculation of equivalent incomes as an inclusive measure taking into account differing non‑monetised circumstances such as health or employment status. The relevance of direct measures of subjective well‑being is also discussed by Jérôme Accardo, in a paper on the contri‑ butions of social statistics to the ‘beyond GDP’ literature: evaluations of non‑market household production, disaggregation of accounts across categories of households for a better assessment of growth inclusiveness, etc. Inclusivity is also the focus of the paper by Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, which describes their Distributional National Accounts (DINA), a method of assigning income and wealth to different groups The opinions and analyses in this article are those of the author(s) do not * Bennett Institute, University of Cambridge ([email protected]) Reminder: views. or Insee’s necessarily reflect their institution’s Citation: Coyle, D. (2020). Preface – National Accounting: Old Questions Revisited, Plus Some New Ones. Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, 517‑518‑519, 5–7. https://doi.org/10.24187/ecostat.2020.517t.2015 ECONOMIE ET STATISTIQUE / ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS N° 517-518-519, 2020 5 in a manner fully consistent with the SNA methodology. Their results show substantial increases in inequality – including a global increase since 1980 despite the growth of China and India – but with substantial differences across countries. Given the way the pandemic is amplifying existing inequalities, it seems likely distribution will remain in sharp focus, in a welcome return to the tradition of early national accountants including Simon Kuznets. When it comes to sustainability, and the position of future generations, the statistical and conceptual challenges are greater. As Blanchet and Fleurbaey note, an assessment of sustainability necessarily involves forecasts to value stocks of wealth, which they suggest falls outside the remit of statistics production. Two aspects of