Integrated System of National Accounts for Pakistan: Concepts,Sources and Methods in Brief

The function of the national accounts is to provide aninterrelated and consistent set of economic statistics of thetransactors in the economy. Those statistics relate to the circular flowin the economy of production, consumption and accumulation. They areused to assess the performance of the economy and should facilitate theapplication of economic theory. In Pakistan, a systematic design of thesystem of national·accounts has been lacking. Basically, the system islimited to macro economic production statistics on value-ad~ed bysectors and expenditure series. Moreover, the present system lacksinternal consistency checks. Discrepancies cannot be assessed due to theexistence of residual sectors. As a result, the national accounls havenot been exploited in their function for the evaluation of theperformance of the economy. During the mid-1980s, a comprehensive reviewof the system was made to improve the national accounts. Therecommendations which were formulated after the review stated that: Thesystem should be rebased from 1959-60 to 1980-81; The system should beextended to include input-output tables, flow-of-funds and institutionalsector accounts; and The system should adopt the integrated nationalaccounts concepts.