17-18 November 2008 World Bank, Washington DC Joe Grice

1. High Level Forum on the Long Term Development of the SNA“Criteria for setting priorities for the SNA research agenda” 17-18 November 2008 World Bank, Washington DC Joe Grice Executive Director, Economic, Labour Market and Social Analysis, Office for National Statistics

2. Prioritisation as the Name of the Game • Not difficult to write down huge numbers of issues • Prioritisation therefore essential • Rational approach to compare costs and benefits • Well developed approach - not least for statistical work programmes • But may need adaption for SNA research purposes

3. User Needs • National accounts not for their own sake but because they are useful • Full regard to user needs thus essential… • … and all the more so given resource constraints • But user needs have number of dimensions

4. Competing Dimensions of User Needs(1) • Historical motivation for National Accounts: - as a tool for economic management -as a measure of welfare Both link to key current agendas 2) Economic demand management versus economic supply and growth Both are of concern to economic agents and policy makers

5. Competing Dimensions of User Needs(2) 3) Macroeconomic needs versus microanalysis Some legitimate concerns centre on the main aggregates. Others on the supporting detail 4) Improving quality versus extending applications Do we put effort into dealing with known weaknesses eg better measurement of quality of services; improving treatment of capital services? Or extensions eg more on informal economy; or environmental outputs?

6. Feasibility and Costs • The other side of the scissors • Whatever the potential benefits, how likely are they to be realised: • How difficult is the research topic? Is it likely to be expensive to resolve? • Practicability. If the research topic does look tractable, are NSIs likely to be able to make the results operational eg are any required data sources likely to be widely available? Are NSIs likely to be able to take the research findings on board in a reasonable timeframe?

7. Breadth of Potential Usage • SNA an international standard (obviously!) • So natural to ask could research results be widely taken up across most countries • Good cross check but not necessarily decisive. Many ways to handle development of research conclusions during transitional phase eg satellite accounts; off line analysis

8. Summary (1) • The research agenda should be more than the cumulative sum of issues arising over time • Application of cost benefit analysis looks like a good potential gatekeeper/ prioritisation tool • Previous slides summarise some of the dimensions to be taken into account

9. Summary (2) • Further work would be needed to turn these considerations into a practical decision-making tool • Eg how to weight claims of competing beneficiaries and of expected benefits • But no more difficult to do this than in emerging practice in constructing statistical work programmes. Or, increasingly, the way other research programmes are determined.