Towards European historical national accounts

Abstract

This paper provides a bird's-eye view of recent developments in historical national accounting in Europe. It focuses on the application of historical national accounts for the study of long term economic growth. It sets out the major problems encountered which affect the comparability of the available national accounts, namely weighting procedures, the treatment of services and the inconsistencies between the accounts and historical benchmark comparisons of output and productivity levels. Finally, the paper makes some suggestions for a research agenda in historical national accounting, which include the extension of geographical coverage to include the Central and Eastern European countries.