United Nations System of National Accounts - Quality and Coverage

Quality and Coverage

The quality and comprehensiveness of national accounts data differs between countries. Among the reasons are that:

• some governments invest far more money in statistical research than other governments.
• economic activity in some countries is much more difficult to measure accurately than in others (for example, a large grey economy, widespread illiteracy, a lack of cash economy, survey access difficulties because of geographic factors or socio-political instability, very large mobility of people and assets - this is particularly the case in sub-Saharan countries).
• some statistical agencies have more scientific autonomy and budgetary discretion than others, allowing them to do surveys or statistical reports which other statistical agencies are prevented from doing for legal, political or financial reasons.
• some countries (for example, Holland, Germany, Britain, Poland and Australia) have a strong intellectual (scholarly or cultural) tradition in the area of social statistics, often going back a hundred or even several hundred years, while others (such as many African countries, where a population census began to be organized by the government only much more recently, and most universities started much later) do not. What matters in this sense is, above all, whether a society sees the value of statistics, makes extensive use of statistical expertise for analytical and policy purposes, and therefore is sympathetic to investing in the statistical enterprise.
• although the United Nations has rather little power to enforce the actual production of statistics to a given standard in member countries, even if international conventions are signed, some of the world's states are part of an international union (for example the European Union, the OECD, or the United States), which requires by agreement that the member states of the union will physically supply standardized data sets, for the purpose of inter-state comparisons, even if the countries themselves might not have so much use for the data supplied. Thus, there may be "external incentives" for the production of more comprehensive statistical information which affect some countries, but are much less evident in others, where the information is required by some international body.