The business accounting matrix: a proposal with an application

Abstract

National accounting matrices (NAM) perfectly describe the economic structure of a national economy, summarising the whole process of generation of primary income and its distribution among the different institutional sectors of the economy. It is not just a way to represent the main economic statistics of an economy but it also serves as the basis for most macroeconomic modelling efforts. The business accounting matrix (BAM) presents the most relevant information for the firm in a similar way, adapted to the descriptive potential of financial accounting, what we believe can be useful both for economic modellers and for decision makers at the firm level. Our intention is not to convince business administrators to change their accounting paradigm but to help analysts and researchers to obtain a comprehensive description of the activity of a firm aligned to well recognised economic statistical standards.

KEYWORDS:

• National accounts
• matrix-based accounting of firms
• enterprise input–output

Acknowledgements

We would like to show our gratitude to MUR Hotels for sharing with us the basic necessary data to prepare the EIO table. We would also like to thank the editor and two reviewers for their thoughtful comments and efforts towards improving our manuscript. The Feedback Sessions organised during the 26th International Input–Output Conference in Juiz de Fora, Brasil, where an early version of this paper was presented, turned out to be of great help in improving this work. Satoshi Inomata, organiser of these sessions also greatly contributed with his comments to our work. We also thank Antonio Estache for his valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.