2. 11 Items
1. Clarification of the income concept in the SNA
2. GDP valued only at basic prices
3. The role of taxes and subsidies on products in the SNA
4. Life insurance and defined benefit pensions
5. Reinvested earnings
6. Accruing interest in the SNA (creditor v debtor)
7. Calculation of FISIM
8. High inflation (1996 OECD manual)
9. The measurement of neutral and real holding gains and losses
10. Income arising from (financial) assets
11. Income from activities undertaken on an informal basis
(exhaustiveness)
3. Gentle slope into a big set of issues
• How to sort these 11 items by priority?
• Are some matters of narrow consistency of
treatment (e.g., across types of insurance,
including pensions) that might be dealt with
immediately?
• Is there a broader theme in the research
agenda on which work might be planned after
the main SNA implementation completes in
2015?
4. Narrow consistency item
• Life insurance and defined benefit pensions
– Align defined benefit pensions with life insurance
(and economic definition of income) or
– Retain SNA’s exclusion of holding gains and losses
from income and align life and other insurance
with defined benefit pensions
5. Two major themes
• Treatment of holding gains and losses
– 1,4,7,8,9,10
– Initial task: Elucidation of the implications for
various parts of the accounts under the theme
treating holding gains and losses according to the
economic concept of income (change in wealth)—
do 1,4,7,8,9,10 exhaust the possibilities?
• Treatment of taxes and subsidies on products
– 2,3
– Initial task: Elucidation …
6. Questions: possible ways forward
• Deal with the insurance consistency issue now
as a clarification or a (minor?) change to the
2008 SNA? (Note for agenda item 2.7.1)
• Revisit the issue with a paper or series of
papers fleshing out the implications of the
economic definition of income for the System
at the next AEG meeting?
