Paul Samuelson once called the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) one of the great inventions of the 20th century. He was right. It is difficult to imagine modern economics and even public discourse on the economy without them. The NIPAs (and related accounts) provide the basic set of estimates on a wide range of economic variables of interest to economists, citizens, policy makers, firms, investors, workers and consumers. They enforce important economic and statistical properties and reveal many of the most important features of the evolution of the economy. In short, it would be difficult to imagine where our understanding of recent economic events and economic history would be without the NIPAs.
Even a short list of some of the major improvements of recent decades, of important historical changes, is impressive. That list includes: 1. The development and implementation of chained Fisher ideal indexes – with their superlative properties (W. Erwin Diewert 1976). 2. The highlighting of the difference between government consumption and investment; 3. The reclassification of software as investment; 4. Computer price hedonics. Add to these an array of improvements in source data and the changes are impressive indeed1 . However, the economy evolves very rapidly, so our statisticians are constantly playing catch-up. Thus, it is potentially quite important when a major new architecture (NA) is developed and implemented for such a fundamental part of our economic knowledge, a project that promises to be the most important improvement in the national economic accounts in at least a generation.
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