The conference brought together around 250 high-profile participants from all the regions of the world, including politicians, public officials working in policy development, national accounts compilers and academics.
The event was held on the occasion of the ongoing update of the system of National Accounts 2008 (2008 SNA), which was officially launched by the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), and the update of the sixth edition of the Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Manual (BPM6) launched by the IMF Statistics Department, coordinated with the update of 2008 SNA, and their planned adoption in 2025.
There will be introduction of three new chapters on well-being and sustainability in the 2025 SNA and there were the respective discussions:
• Chapter 2. National Accounts and measures of well-being and (environmental) sustainability: More general discussion on the SNA and measures of welfare, or more generally, well-being and sustainability, followed by the introduction of a broader framework of national accounts;
• Chapter 34. Measuring well-being: Discussion of the concept of well-being and various approaches/methods to measure it, and how extended accounts can support all of this;
• Chapter 35. Measuring sustainability: Discussion on monitoring sustainability using the capital approach, what the SNA does (not) measure, and SEEA as a complementary system to monitor environmental sustainability.
In BPM7, attention will be paid to sustainable finance.
Welcome message was delivered by Mariana Kotzeva (Eurostat) and Stefan Schweinfest (UN Statistics Division).
The Opening Panel: Discussion on “Statistical needs for policy making in a changing world”, moderated by Mariana Kotzeva, Eurostat, aimed at discussing the role of statistics with a focus on macroeconomic statistics for policy making. Panellists brought to the attention of producers of statistics the point of view of high-level users on how official statistics, and in particular macro-economic statistics, support policy making. The session also helped identifying possible gaps, which statisticians should address.
The Closing Panel discussion with a moderator Mariana Kotzeva, Eurostat, brought together the ideas for a program of work that emerged during the previous sessions and the work of the United Nations Network of Economic Statisticians.
The discussed topics were the issues of changes to the SNA and BPM, including communication and collaboration, Priorities for the update of the 2008 SNA and BPM7: digitalization, globalization, wellbeing and sustainability. Of special interest were the issues of communication aspects, SNA/BPM coordination and involvement of stakeholders, timeline, outreach and implementation support and the future of international statistical standards, as well as close cooperation and coordination across all international standards for compiling macroeconomic statistics.
